If you've noticed people around here seem incurably grumpy/grouchy, now we have empirical proof: a recent study has named Connecticut as almost dead last in a state-by-state ranking of American happiness.
Two economics professors, Andrew J. Oswald of the University of Warwick in England and Stephen Wu of Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. analyzed a load of data to come up with their findings. Factors included climate, taxes, cost of living, commuting time, crime rates and schools.
New York was at the very bottom of the list. Connecticut was first runner-up.
If you talk to anybody in this state about the cost of living, the climate, crime or commuting time, it's no wonder we were near the bottom of this survey. Our highways are a mess, the weather outside is frightful much of the year and people are feeling taxed to death.
Maybe it's because of my upbringing by a father who worked for Norman Vincent Peale (author of "The Power of Positive Thinking") that I often tend to tell the nay-sayers to lighten up a little. Hey Nutmeg State, look at what we've got: the shoreline, those hills and mountains, the parks, the theaters, those town and city greens...
I say the same thing to New Haveners when they start to whine and gripe. Dudes, take a walk on the New Haven Green! Visit Lighthouse Point and the beach (well, not right now). Go to one of our city's museums. Maybe the dinosaurs at the Peabody will lift your spirits a little...
You know who really needs to improve their outlooks? The people who respond to the New Haven Register's "Soundoff" questions, many of them from the suburbs, where I suppose life is delightful. I get especially annoyed when they answer anything pertaining to New Haven. On and on they vent about "the parking, the crime," etc. I'll bet they haven't set foot downtown in months or years; they're just too scared or paranoid or even prejudiced.
Would it be so tragic if they had to walk a couple of blocks after parking their cars? Would it kill them to get some exercise? Do they really think they'd be mugged during that short walk?
I have lived in this city for decades, have walked all over it and I have never been a victim of serious crime. Nor have my daughters, nor has my wife. We like this place.
We even like Connecticut.
OK, so you're wondering where people are happy. It's in the warm and sunnier places. The Top 10 are: Louisiana, Hawaii, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, South Carolina, Alabama and Maine.
I know, Maine is not warm. I guess Mainiacs are just possessed of sunny dispositions. Or maybe it's because their highways aren't jammed, except when we all go up there in the summertime.
Anyway, let's all try to have a happy new year. I know it's cold, I know there's more snow on the ground.
But when I drove past the New Haven Green this morning, it looked beautiful.

One of the Beatles tunes Charles Rosenay selected to get us in the mood for his "lecture" at the Derby Public Library last week (Nov. 10) was "When I'm 64."
This prompted me to reflect that we Beatlemaniacs are getting closer and closer to that figure. And so I asked Rosenay, "How old are you, Charles?"
He wouldn't tell me. He said he never answers that question.
But beyond that gap, Rosenay was very candid and confessional in his talk, which he entitled "In My Life: A Beatles Fan's Odyssey." (I wrote a column about this for the NH Register, which appeared Nov. 15; this blog contains some nuggets I didn't have room for in the column).
Among the 40 or so middle-aged Beatles fans in the audience was Joseph Zgola of Ansonia, who had come to the library clutching a photo he had asked Paul McCartney to autograph for him. Unlike Rosenay, Zgola had never before met a Beatle.
Zgola had waited patiently outside Yale's Sterling Library before the ceremony began for commencement day in that wondrous spring day of 2008. McCartney was being given an honorary degree by Yale and was standing in the line of dignataries, preparing to march in with them.
"I got sunburned standing outside that library," Zgola told me. "I didn't care."
He reported McCartney was very polite and gracious as he signed the photo.
Of course Rosenay, now living in Orange with a wife and three kids, had many stories to tell us about meeting the Beatles during the decades he has organized Beatles conventions, published a fan magazine and coordinated tours of Liverpool (home of the fab four).
Those of you who have missed Rosenay's hiatus from these events are undoubtedly pleased by the news that he is reviving the tradition Nov. 28-29 at the Downtown Stamford Holiday Inn. (See https://beatexpo.ticketleap.com/BEATexpo).
Perhaps Rosenay's biggest coup was luring the band's original drummer, Pete Best, to one or more of his conventions during the 1980s. Still, Rosenay stunned us with the revelation that Best is his favorite Beatle. He explained he got to be good friends with the guy during their convention experiences.
"Of the fab four, it's Paul," Rosenay told me later. "That's who I wanted to be. That's why I grew my hair like him."
The Beatle Rosenay never met was John Lennon. You have to believe that if Lennon hadn't been shot to death in 1980, Rosenay eventually would have found a way to meet him; he is that persistent.
Talking about Lennon's death still gets Rosenay choked up. He recalled hearing "Starting Over" come over his car radio shortly after the assassination. "I had to pull over; I couldn't see."
When he met McCartney, Rosenay recalled, it was backstage at a show in Birmingham, England in 1989.
"My mouth is doing crazy things and my fingers are numb," he told us, recalling that magic moment when McCartney walked into the room. "My heart is palpitating."
When promoter Sam Leach introduced Rosenay to McCartney, Rosenay told him, "You have no idea what you've meant to me and how you've affected my life."
That night, Rosenay said, marked "the second time I cried for a Beatle; it was when Paul sang 'Yesterday.'"
Eventually Rosenay got to meet Ringo Starr too; he was at a press conference and called out the first question. "I asked him how his grandchildren were."
Meeting George Harrison was tougher. Rosenay organized a tour of Japan to coincide with Harrison's Japanese tour. This was Harrison's final tour before his death.
Through serendipity, Rosenay and his tour group were at the airport in Japan when guess-who came strolling past them. "I saw this long-haired guy with his guitar and I shouted, 'People! There's George!' Everyone was freaking out."
Rosenay called out, "George! Can we take your picture?"
Harrison replied, "Yes, but I'm not going to stop." Yet Harrison started walking in place so they had plenty of time to take their pictures.
Harrison asked, "Will that do?" and Rosenay replied, breathlessly, "Yes! Thank you!"
Yes, you Beatles. Thank you, boys.

Few New Haveners know or remember this, but when "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" hit the screen 40 years ago, it had its world premiere right here at the Roger Sherman Theater.
Our town had a local connection: the film's director, George Roy Hill, was a Yale graduate, class of 1943. When he unveiled his work at that downtown theater, he brought along the film's stars, Paul Newman (also a Yale grad) and Robert Redford.
Yale's Whitney Humanities Center commemorated the event this weekend (Oct. 23-25) by showing that movie, Hill's "Slaughterhouse-Five" and two documentaries, "The Making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five."
"Slaughterhouse-Five," based on the great novel by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., is one of my favorite movies and who doesn't like watching Butch and Sundance? Who can forget Newman on that bicycle with Katharine Ross to the tune of "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head"? But I was more interested in seeing the two behind-the-scenes documentaries, so I made it to the Humanities Center Saturday afternoon to check them out.
Here's a great thing about living in or near New Haven, even if you're not a Yalie or an alumnus: for many events such as this one, you can just walk in, no admission asked, sit down and take in some fine work as well as hear insightful discussion in follow-up question-and-answer sessions.
That's what I did on a rainy Saturday afternoon, although I was stunned to see only about 15 other people in the auditorium. Where is the Yale film community? Maybe more people showed up Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday afternoon to see the actual films; I hope so.
But for those select few who turned out Saturday afternoon, we got a rare chance to see those two documentaries, especially the one about the making of "Slaughterhouse-Five," as it isn't available to the public. Yale has it and is taking good care of it until, one hopes, legal issues can be resolved and it is released to the public.
On hand to talk about the documentaries was Robert Crawford, who directed "The Making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and co-directed "The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five." Nick Doob, the other co-director of "The Making of Slaughter-house Five," was there too.
Both guys were personable, candid and generous with their time. Crawford told us, as was evident from the documentaries, that making a movie is "organized chaos, like going to war. It's moving 200 people and tons of equipment. So it's a very anxious process."
But Crawford said Newman always wanted to have fun and was able to lighten up the atmosphere. Watching Hill at work, the viewer sees an intense, focused but kind man who appreciates input from his actors. (Hill died in 2002 but won fame and recognition for these two films as well as "The Sting"; he got an Oscar for that one.)
Vonnegut was interviewed for the "Slaughterhouse-Five" documentary and he avidly endorsed the film of his book. He was clearly amazed Hill had pulled it off; this was a novel that jumped back and forth from World War II and the bombing of Dresden, Germany (which Vonnegut witnessed as a prisoner of war) to present day and then the far future on the planet Trafalmadore.
Crawford told a great anecdote: Hill asked Vonnegut to do a cameo in the film, playing the crotchety author who is preparing a book on the Dresden bombing. The guy is in a hospital bed next to Billy Pilgrim, protagonist of "Slaughterhouse-Five" and the author keeps talking about his great book project. Pilgrim (played by Michael Sacks in his first screen role) turns and says softly, "I was there." The author gruffly replies, "The hell with him; let him write his own book." Well, Vonnegut delivered the lines and Hill, in the editing room, had to conclude it didn't work -- Vonnegut was too nice to convincingly play that part. And so Vonnegut's scene ended up on the cutting room floor (where it is now?) and another person was called it to play that part.
I suggest you go out and rent "Slaughter-House Five" (but first read the book, if you haven't already). This is a great humanitarian anti-war statement. It's fitting it was shown at a Humanities Center.

My daughter didn't get it when she saw me putting on my Lafayette College sweatshirt.
"But Dad," she said, "you left Lafayette. You didn't even like it."
It's true; I had transferred out of the place in 1970, in the middle of my junior year, because I could no longer stand living in Easton, Penna. and I wanted to live in Boston. Hence: hello, Boston University! And that's where I obtained my degree.
But I maintain some sentiment for the old place, as I informed my daughter. And so I was heading over to Yale Bowl a couple of Saturdays ago to root for my "alma mater" against Yale.
It was a rare event. Lafayette rarely plays Yale and hadn't made it to New Haven since 1990, when they lost by one point. I saw that game too.
Lafayette had never beaten Yale in football. Maybe this would be the time.
Only a couple of thousand people were in the huge Yale Bowl Oct. 3. It was drizzling and a non-Ivy League contest. When I settled in on the visitors' side, it seemed there were almost as many of us as there were Yale fans across the way.
When I arrived at Lafayette in 1968, it was all-male. Don't ask me why I ever went there, but there I was. Well, it being the '60s, we held demonstrations: "What do we want? Women! When do we want them? Now!"
And we got them, at the beginning of my junior year. But the 13:1 ratio wasn't much of an improvement. And so for that reason and the smalltown factor, I split for Boston.
And this is why I spent so much of that recent football game staring at the Lafayette cheerleaders. They were female, you see.
The Lafayette Marching Band didn't show up, which was upsetting. I played drums in that band and we marched all over various fields at halftimes. Where were they?
But the game was the thing. Lafayette fell behind in the early going but then they got it into gear and the passing game clicked (thanks to QB Rob Curley) and the 'Pards started pushing the Bulldogs all over the field. It was hard to believe it was so easy.
We made a lot of noise on our side and survived the rain and saw history happen: Lafayette 31, Yale 14!
It was the sweatshirt that did it.

Mary Travers, the passionate female voice of Peter, Paul and Mary, had been sick for a long time. But she had kept performing and somehow I thought she would always be around.
And so I was unprepared and shocked when the news broke laast week that Travers had died at Danbury Hospital.
Travers was 72, which is also unsettling. The cause of her death was complications from chemotherapy for a bone marrow transplant she had several years ago after developing leukemia.
Her lengthy obituary in the New York Times also revealed that she had stage fright. It took a lot of persuading to get her to join Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey in 1961.
Their manager, Albert Grossman, wanted Travers to "retain an air of mystery," so she didn't speak on stage between songs, at least in their early period.
Well, she got over her stage fright, found her voice and never stopped talking.
Shortly before Peter, Paul and Mary did a revival show at the New Haven Coliseum in October 1980, I interviewed all three of them. Travers spoke to me from her home in Rredding, CT.
I remember that she was warm and friendly, as I had expected.
"I'm optimistic," she said. "I assume we won't blow ourselves off the map...I'm optimistic that we'll figure out how to be civilized."
At that time she was supporting Jimmy Carter for re-election and was about to ask Yarrow and Stookey to join her in that effort.
"The world is in chaos," she said. "This is no time for a beginner. The Europeans are terrified of (Ronald) Reagan -- as they should be."
You know the rest of the story. Reagan was elected president, launching a conservative movement against many of the values embodied by Peter, Paul and Mary.
And the world is still in chaos. We're still trying to figure out how to be civilized. Peter, Paul and Mary made it a little more so.

Yes, they're gone already, those tennis players; the circus has left town. (Alert film buffs will realize that in my headline I'm quoting Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz": "My! People come and go so quickly here!")
I got out there to the Pilot Pen Tennis Tournament just once last week, but it was a good show on that Monday night. My wife, daughters and I saw Svetlana Kuznetsova defeat Jie Zheng in three sets, then watched the rising young Yank, Sam Querrey, oust the pouty Frenchman, Marc Gicquel, also in three sets (except we had to leave early for that one).
Some people don't bother with Pilot Pen because they don't know the players. Listen, we didn't even know who was playing until we showed up that night. But we did kknow we were going to see some great tennis by players who might soon be big names.
Querrey, for instance, is already turning heads at the U.S. Open with his 130 mph serves. This kid is going to be a star.
Pilot Pen is also about the food. I think my kids look forward to the big Food Court more than they do the tennis. The only problem is the area is so popular, the tables and picnic benches fill up very quickly; we ate sitting on the ground.
My wife and I were coming to this New Haven tournament before our kids were born, back when it was called the Volvo Tournament. We've seen John McEnroe (who famously tipped a TV camera into a cameraman's lap), Ivan Lendl, Lindsay Davenport, James Blake and many others. It's a cool thing for this town to have.
And you know what else? In the middle of the action, there came the announcement inviting all of us up in the "cheap seats" to come on down to join the elite! Try doing that at Yankee Stadium; those ushers would eat you up like a Yankee frank.
Kudos also to the organizers of Pilot Pen for keeping the between-sets music at a less-than-ear-splitting volume. That's not true at most sporting events.
My kids don't like it that you're not supposed to yell during tennis matches; it's seen as discourteous. But I like it. I find it a nice change from other entertainment.
Why did we leave the Querrey match early? It was 11:15 p.m. by the time they finished the first set. We had gotten a taste of the future and we left happy.
I sure hope this event has its sponsorship renewed. Can you imagine driving past that tennis stadium and seeing it empty 52 weeks a year rather than the current 51? r

I'm told that some people go to Paris to see the Louvre, a highly-regarded museum containing such works as the Mona Lisa. I'm told there are plenty of other world-renowned galleries, cathedrals and museums in that city.

Sure, I checked out a lot of those "must sees" when I was there recently with my wife and two daughters. But the real gotta-go item on my list was this: the grave of Jim Morrison.

If you know your cultural history, you're aware that Morrison, lead singer of the Doors, died in Paris in 1971. He was living there, trying to escape the music business and become a poet or something. He was allegedly found dead in his bathtub from a "heart attack." Come on, the dude was 27. Can you say: drugs?

I didn't idolize the guy but I liked the music. For more than 30 years I've been hearing about his grave and the pilgrims who hang out there. I wanted to see it.

You know what really shocked me? My wife and daughters didn't want to go. They preferred to go shopping along the Champs Elysees, the big-deal boulevard near the Arc de Triomphe. So be it. To each his own.

During the Metro ride to the Pere Lachais Cemetery, I had Doors music running through my head...

"Strange days have found us..."

You know what else shocked me? There were no huge crowds of tourists lining up at the cemetery, as I had seen at the Caehdral of Notre Dame and the Louvre. Where was everybody?

I just walked into the place, passing those big stone walls (after buying a map of the cemetery from a vendor, which gave me some idea of where to find J.M.)

Here's another shocking thing: there were no signs directing people to his grave. I had to keep studying the map, trying to figure out where I was in this massive lay-out of thousands of headstones. I was caught in a big maze and nobody seemed to speak English. How could that be?

"Tried to run, tried to hide--break on through to the other side..."

Truly: I must have been wandering around that place for a good half-hour when at last I saw a cluster of people and I knew: This is it!

"My eyes have seen you..."

I came upon a simple headstone: "James Douglas Morrison 1943-1971." There was a line below it that I couldn't decipher because it was faded and probably in another language. It didn't look like French.

There were fresh flowers on his stone and a basket with ribbon that read: "Fan Club Francois Doors." Also two framed poems, the lettering too small to be read from a distance. And yes, we were being kept about five feet away because this was the only grave in the place that had a metal police barricade surrounding it.

Why the security? Because idiotic vandals/worshippers had, early on, chipped away at it, taking souvenirs! I noticed the front stonework was slightly chiseled away.

I had expected to see some English-speaking tourists at this site, but it didn't happen. (The dollar is very weak now vs. the euro, so it costs big bucks to travel around Europe.) When I saw a middle-aged dude wearing an Aerosmith shirt and leather vest and shades, I thought: "Ah, yes! A Yank!" But then he started talking to his wife and young son in a foreign tongue. She was wearing a Disneyland hat, worn backward. The big dude had rings on every finger. The kid just started at the grave, looking very sad. He seemed to be about 10 years old. Finally his mom consoled him with hugs and kisses.

I wasn't as emotionally moved as that kid, even though the Doors were my contemporaries. No, I never saw them in concert, not even when they came to the New Haven Arena in 1967 and Morrison got into a fight with a cop and they stopped the show and arrested him.

"Blood on the streets in the town of New Haven..."

It was starting to get a little creepy around that grave, so I split. I took a long, last look and I thought: "You blew it, Jimmy. You could've written a lot more songs, even some more poems, done some more touring. But no, you just fed your head like a big dope addict and now here you are, lying in a cemetery where gawkers come and stare at your name. This is the closest I ever got to you, but it was no concert -- just an odd kind of freak show.

"This is The End..."