■Activity at the Three County Fair slackened slightly Wednesday as youngsters in the Northampton area deserted the midway to return to school. In the early afternoon hours, only handfuls of people clustered at booths and games, but business picked up as soon as pari-mutuel racing began.
■A new attraction will be on hand Friday afternoon at the Three County Fair. Forbes Library will station a media mobile in the exhibit area between 2 and 4 p.m. Two library staff members, Cathy O’Donnell and Mrs. Muriel Parsisson, will demonstrate some audio-visual equipment from the vehicle.
■For the next two weeks, Northampton Police Officer Pablo Rodriguez will trade in his badge and gun for a set of military fatigues. Rodriguez, the community resource officer assigned to Florence, will be on leave for the next two weeks to serve his required time in the U.S. Army Reserves.
■Janna Goodwin, an active member of the Amherst arts community until her move to Colorado four years ago, began her new job yesterday as interim director of the Northampton Center for the Arts. Goodwin succeeds Olwen Dowling, who left the center in August after only 10 months as executive director.
■A confirmed case of mosquito-borne Eastern equine encephalitis in Belchertown has local boards of health warning residents to take precaution against mosquito bites in the hours from dusk to dawn. The Belchertown Board of Health is recommending that residents curtail outdoor activities from dusk to dawn, wear protective clothing and use mosquito repellent.
■For decades, the only photographic image of Emily Dickinson shows her as a 16-year-old girl, still several years from the start of her prolific creation of poetry. The possibility that a second daguerreotype has surfaced showing Dickinson at an older age in the late 1850s and on the cusp of her significance is generating excitement among those who study the famed Amherst poet.