Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Marylou's Coffee Taking Over The South Coast



The South Coast is the next domino to fall in the world conquest plan of Marylou's Coffee.

Marylou's Coffee, a cultural icon of the South Shore, has almost 40 locations around Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Most of them lie within a stretch of the Irish Riviera running from Weymouth to Plymouth.

Marylou's has made inroads on Cape Cod (Sagamore, Sandwich, Hyannis), interior Plymouth County (Raynham Brockton, etc...) and Rhode Island (Greenwich, Cumberland, Providence). They have a huge gap on the South Coast, where Dunkin Donuts and Honey Dew Donuts still hold sway.

Marylou made a move to address that problem Sunday, opening a new spot in Rochester, right on the Wareham line. The South Coast is now bracketed, with Marylou pushing west from Rhodey, east from Cape Cod/Plymouth, and south from Taunton and Lakeville.

The location in Rochester is based in the new Seasons convenience store plaza. They celebrated n force last Sunday, with the little Marylou girls out greeting the cars.

Marylou's is known for their comely staff (although rumors of Marylou's as the Hooters of coffee have been debunked by numerous plus-sized and male employees) and their spectacular flavored coffee. Once you have one, you will never wait in  ten-car line at Dunkin again.

I can't even get on this computer and libel someone until I have taken a large Funky Fanabla to the head. I can't pronounce "Fanabla," and taught in urban high schools long enough that I pronounce "funky" as "fonkee," sort of along the lines of how the bear on the Muppets pronounces his name. The girls at Cedarville mostly have it down by now, and I tip well.

Go on in and say hi to the new Marylou's girls. Tell them that Cranberry County Magazine sent you, and they'll give you no discount whatsoever.


Friday, December 2, 2016

MIAA State Championship Football Schedule

Saturday is when we settle the Who Is The Best Football Team questions for like 8 different arguments. We get some cross-state fights.... I can almost guarantee that no one from Shrewsbury or Wachonah has ever spent much time worrying about how life is in Duxbury or Mashpee, and vice versa. Their views will change after they have beaten or been beaten by the other in front of their townmates, parents and cheerleaders.

Our predictions run as follows:

Everett 21, Xaverian 18
King Phillip 24, Reading 23
Duxbury 56, Shrewsbury 0
Falmouth 28, Marblehead 27
Hanover 18, Grafton 10
East Bridgewater 20, St. Mary's 7
Mashpee 34, Wahconah 0
Maynard 7, Mills-Hopedale 6



Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Dense Fog Advisory For Cape Cod, South Coast

Bourne Bridge, 150 meters away
...AREAS OF DENSE FOG ALONG THE SOUTH COAST AS WELL AS THE CAPE
AND ISLANDS WILL GRADUALLY LIFT THROUGH LATE MORNING...

AREAS OF DENSE FOG WERE AFFECTING THE SOUTH COAST...CAPE AND
ISLANDS EARLY THIS MORNING. VISIBILITIES WERE BEING REDUCED TO ONE
QUARTER OF A MILE OR LESS AT TIMES. MOTORISTS TRAVELING SHOULD
DRIVE WITH EXTRA CAUTION AND STAY A SAFE DISTANCE IN BACK OF THE
VEHICLE IN FRONT OF THEM. VISIBILITIES SHOULD GRADUALLY IMPROVE
THROUGH LATE MORNING.

===================

SOUTHERN PLYMOUTH:

...AREAS OF DENSE FOG ALONG THE SOUTH COAST AS WELL AS THE CAPE
AND ISLANDS WILL GRADUALLY LIFT THROUGH LATE MORNING...

AREAS OF DENSE FOG WERE AFFECTING THE SOUTH COAST...CAPE AND
ISLANDS EARLY THIS MORNING. VISIBILITIES WERE BEING REDUCED TO ONE
QUARTER OF A MILE OR LESS AT TIMES. MOTORISTS TRAVELING SHOULD
DRIVE WITH EXTRA CAUTION AND STAY A SAFE DISTANCE IN BACK OF THE
VEHICLE IN FRONT OF THEM. VISIBILITIES SHOULD GRADUALLY IMPROVE
THROUGH LATE MORNING.

lifting some...

Thanksgiving Leftovers: Cranberry Harvest In Eastern Massachusetts


If you need more Thanksgiving before December hits, we have a dozen or so pictures of the local cranberry harvests. We're emptying the picture stash into this, so some may be blurry. 



You need more than one truck to harvest cranberries... one to store them, and one to, uhm, pump water and stuff.


Those trees could have helped us out by going all fall foliage, but No. I wonder if the farmer uses foliage color as a sort of harvest alarm, i.e. "when the oak turns scarlet, flood the bogs."


Those commercials for Ocean Spray should have more Cape Verdean crews in them.


We try to get all of the crews in our shots.

Add 25000000 pounds of sugar, boil, strain..... Voila! Cranberry Sauce for everyone in Belgium.

We're berry, berry happy that you chose to visit our humble site.


There's that machine without the two trucks attached to it.

The cranberries won the popular vote, but the water ruled the Electoral College.

Red tide

Blurry as hell, but kind of cool.

The closer-to-shore berries erected a Trump wall to keep the mid-bog berries from coming over and causing 9/11.

Any larger than this, and the pic gets reallllllly blurry

I'm not sure if the farmers or if Ocean Spray divides the red and white berries. I try to not bother the workers with questions when I trespass on their job site.

If they harvested in July, my Facebook profile picture would be my silhouette in those berries after I belly-flopped into them. Unfortunately, my first status update would read "being beaten by a Cape Verdean cranberry harvest crew."

Blood on the highway... oh wait, that's just a big cranberry stain, like on Gorbachev's head.

We tend to work Carver, Plymouth and Wareham heavily, as they sort of encircle our office.

We hope that you enjoyed our cranberry articles.

See you next year!


Thursday, November 24, 2016

Happy Thanksgiving From Cranberry County Magazine

Crossin' my supper dish!

Up until tomorrow (AFTER dinner time), turkeys will be very nervous. By Friday, they will be downright uppity.

Photographers, even bad ones, operate like apex predators do when stalking herds. Isolate one away from the pack and get him when you can.

You vegetarians out there might enjoy yesterday's article about cranberries. We may do a second version of that, we have a veritable pile of cranberry bog pics.


S'up?

If the water used to flood the bog was instead vodka, this would actually be a pretty good Cape Codder drink for Godzilla.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

The Trillion Cran March

You know that a publication named Cranberry County Magazine is going to bombard you with burgundy as Thanksgiving nears. Our photographers were all over eastern Massachusetts, seeing who had the goods. 

We focused heavily on Plymouth, Carver and Wareham. You could also draw a triangle running from Duxbury to Freetown to Yarmouth Port, and assume that we stumbled through every bog in it.


Cranberry County University mathematicians estimate that our photographers captured 1,000,000,000,000 cranberries on film. That's a trillion, babe....


Even a rotten photographer like Stephen can do OK if he works with acres of berries directly in front of him where he can't miss them.


The urge to push him in from behind while he was taking this shot was almost overwhelming.


I totally want to wade two strippers into that and have them wrestle for three rounds while drunks throw money at them.


Let's roll through the cranberry harvest process. First, you get a cranberry bog.


Then you flood it, and hire this dude to roll through it with his cranberry-loosening tractor which probably has some technical name that I'm unaware of.

Once he's done, you have acres of floating berries.


Enter the workers...

Cool man, rotten shot...


Sorry for the blurry, but this is the tube which sucks up all the berries that the Cape Verdean guys pulled into a pile.


I think this is where the water goes after the berries are sorted out of it, or it's where they're getting the water. I don't know this farm stuff that well, I was raised in f*cking Dorchester until it was too late to make a farm boy out of me.


The cranberries then get pumped up into a big truck, where they get sent off to Ocean Spray.



The big truck in question.... you would need a corresponding truck full of sugar to create a 15000 sq foot serving of cranberry sauce.

Sometimes, the truck spills some cranberries, people run over them, and you get roads that look like this. This is in Carver... and, no, it's not the Cranberry Highway. That's in the 'Ham.

Cranberry Jones got his nickname at Yale, where he spent his freshman year eating nothing but cranberry products in an attempt to turn his skin burgundy. It didn't work, he had the runs for 7 months and he's now our organized crime contact.
We've got the boys working hard, and we'll be back over the weekend with some more shots.