People: Going where the trouble is
By Sean Frederick news@hippopress.com

New Hampshire native Jennifer Poidatz has seen a lot of the world. For 15 years, her work for Catholic Relief Services has sent her trotting the globe to some of the most notorious hotspots of civil and economic strife. In 1994, she was sent to Rwanda, then in the throes of a genocidal civil war — the first in a series of “crisis” assignments in countries devastated by ethnic or political violence. Posts in Haiti, Burundi, and Angola followed. In 2005, she managed CRS’s tsunami relief in Sri Lanka.Now, in her current post as CRS’s country representative for India, she’s tackling a food crisis plaguing the nation of more than a billion people. She was recently back in the Granite State.

Working with other artists can be like “climbing up a very steep slope of egos,” said painter James Aponovich, the state’s artist laureate.

While I was reading a front-page editorial in the state’s largest newspaper on Friday it struck me that fans of a particular political party and fans of a particular sports team are exactly the opposite when things go bad. When it happens in sports (not that it ever does around here), callers to talk radio want to kill the players and fire the manager. In politics, no matter how bad it is, they blame it on the other guy even if their guy has occupied the corner office for, oh, say, the last eight years.

When managers at the Highlander Inn in Manchester decided to upgrade their food service, they turned to Chef Dennis Brunet and 3C’s Catering. Brunet and his wife, Pam, moved their entire catering operation to the hotel’s conference center and are now responsible for all of the on-site food service, which includes the Cozy Culinary Café.

Will Smith returns to Independance Day

I must apologize to my legion of devoted fans (hi Mom!). An unexpected business trip recently took me away from my trusty typewriter and into the heart of gadget manufacturing, the ancestral home of everything with blinky LEDs and DC power supplies: China.