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LA's Louise Huebner brags that she's the only "official" witch in the world.
Laurie Cabot might have something to say about that. Not only the "Official Witch of Salem," (way scarier than Los Angles, at least in its own way) she even has her own Wikipedia entry.
With circulation declines approaching double digits, the Globe responds by targeting the under-served ornithologist demographic.
Who could resist a front-page story about an obscure European vulture?
"It's amazing to see these birds swallowing the big vertebrae of a cow, almost like people eating popcorn," [a veterinary scientist] said.
Amazing is the word I'm thinking of, too.
From Montego Bay to Edinburgh Castle, here are 13 real haunted houses.
Fashion can be pretty scary. And that's even before you see the price.
Romney - Bush 08? Apparently the idea is that Jeb is Bush-lite and strategists think he would help the ticket (name recognition) more than hurt (Iraq). I don't know. I just like the idea of a presidential ticket with two guys named Mitt and Jeb.
Michele McPhee shines a light on behind-the-scenes action at the police department -- while also telling us something about how crime reporting works.
There really is a lot of stuff available here.
TV news programming is, well, not very interesting. The people, with a few exceptions, are robotic stereotypes. And the sets and graphics are cookie-cutter.
The next obvious step is this.
It was either vegetables or fruits that were good for memory, I don't remember which. I think it was fruits.
John Keith points out that if you want to build a dramatic skyscraper in Boston, bringing in a "starchitect" helps.
Pablo, at BMG, does the math for school aid and it isn't pretty.
...The Romney-Healey administration prevailed over the biggest disinvestment in public education in the nation...
He has links to the numbers.
Kerry Healey admits that negative ads torpedoed her campaign. Not her ads, the ones used against her. Dan Kennedy has some thoughts.
They say that golf is crack for middle aged suburbanites. The Library Despot proves the point. Fortunately there's a happy ending: Ice cream.
I wrote earlier that I thought Jon Keller did a good job moderating the last debate but Aaron Margolis thinks otherwise.
I guess you could argue about whether the questions were softballs. He thinks they were. I liked the questions. But on the issue of overall control I still think Keller did a good job, certainly better than David Gergen. Chris Wallace, who moderated an earlier debate, also did a good job of keeping order (at least for everyone but Christy Mihos) but he didn't have the grasp of local issues that Keller has.
Margolis thinks that it was the worst debate yet. Granted, it wasn't as intense as earlier debates but I don't think it was because of the moderator -- more the fault of the candidates.
The Actor's Shakespeare Project is staging Hamlet at the Strand Theater. In fact, the theater is part of the staging. The audience sits close, up on the stage with the actors. The experience is reminiscent of Vanya on 42nd Street. If you go you'll be pleasantly surprised. It's been extended through November 17th so there's plenty of time.
I'm not a purist but I also don't like overly distracting gimmicks. This production was true to the play but also not stodgy. Great acting, great theater, great production. What more could you want? How about a parking spot right across the street? You won't find that on Brattle Street on a Friday night.
Well, we haven't gained as much as we thought we lost, but a plus is a plus. Boston is accumulating, not losing, population. (Not only that, statewide, the economy is growing at double the national rate. This is a lot of good news for a slow news day.)
The population increase shouldn't be all that surprising. The US has hit the 300 million mark. All those people have to live somewhere and it's more likely to be here than Nebraska.
...More than half of Americans live within 50 miles of the Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf and Great Lakes coasts on just a fifth of the country's land area, according to the Center for Environment and Population, a research and policy group that's based in New Canaan, Conn.
This article in USA Today sees baby boomer retirement as having a big impact on population shifts in coming years.
UPDATE: Another take on Boston's population numbers and the change from I128.
I'm not a germ nut, maybe even a little too much the opposite. But on occasion I shake hands with prominent people who, more often than not, are in town on a whirlwind tour, shaking hand, after hand, after hand. The first thing I do afterwards is head to my desk and get out the anti-bacterial hand cleaner.
From my end it's just one handshake but the other guy, one shake at a time, collects everyone's germs and takes them home to his family. Turns out, it's an occupational hazard for politicians, especially at campaign time.
The jury is out on whether local ownership of newspapers will keep them afloat, but in LA, they're putting their hope into reporters to save the day.
There's an interesting article in the LA Times on how some of the ascendent Democrats are actually pretty conservative.
It looks like Kerry Healey is going positive and has put those scary TV ads behind her -- at least I haven't seen one in the last day or so. Damage control, but probably too late.
Speaking of positive campaign ads, check out this Schwarzenegger 06 ad. He seems like a very happy guy. Way too happy, if you ask me.
There's a blogger campaign from the left to influence the Google search results for a set of conservative politicians. The idea is to put a critical article at the top of the list when searching on the politician's name. It's being coordinated by MyDD.
A good idea? I don't think so. It's not so much an attack on a political target as an attack on the playing field. And it's Borkian in that, even if effective in the short term, it'll probably come back to haunt the people that started it.
Forget 911 conspiracies and moon landing coverups. This is the secret that they don't want you to know.
On the debate: no excitement, no new insights. Jon Keller was good, though. I assume someone's trying to dig up that Kennedy-Bush immigration bill.
Best answer, I thought, was from Grace Ross who, when asked how much she gave to charity last year, answered, not much. "I don't make much." It was especially effective since it came after all the millionaires talked about all the money they gave away.
There's something people can relate to.
Not only is Patrick going to win, this isn't even a contest anymore. The last debate hasn't been held but the post-mortems have begun. And how about that Herald front page headline?
Was it the Romney legacy, the Big Dig, the attack ads or all of the above? Dan Kennedy says it was the ads and humorously suggests that Patrick supporters might want to send money to Healey -- so she can air more of them.
Joan Vennochi thinks it was the general tone of Healey's campaign.
...Instead of framing the issues in a way that reflects the real concerns of average voters, she stretched them into cartoon-like fear factors. Unless you are part of the angry talk radio crowd, it's a turn-off.
It wasn't too long ago that the conventional wisdom in Republican circles had Healey trouncing Patrick. He was their dream candidate. It was Tom Reilly they were really worried about.
So much for conventional wisdom.
Glen Reynolds, writing on the speed of air travel, quoted a guy from NASA who observed that although while in the air we fly at hundreds of miles an hour, the average speed, door-to-door, home to destination, is much, much slower.
The New York Post has done a similar analysis with the crosstown bus. Bottom line: you can walk faster and save the fare.
The Governor is criss-crossing primary states. The Lt. Governor is out campaigning. Who, Kim Atkins asks, is running the state? It's a reasonable question and the answer is probably some unsung bureaucrat who is at least as capable as anyone else.
But the interesting part of the article comes when spokesman Eric Fenstrom is asked about Romney's travels. In substance, he answers: It's not true -- the Democrats do it too.
Classic.
"We are extremely concerned that Concorde is about to experience another winter without shelter."
I thought at first that this article was about some kind of animal, but it's about an airplane.
Massachusetts isn't the only state with an important Governor's race -- one that might end in one party control for Democrats. Seven other states are in the same boat.
Commas are making a comeback according to the Washington Post. Or at least they are in one classroom in the DC area. And if they run out of commas down there, I've got plenty of extras lying around.
If you've ever tried to look up song lyrics you've probably had to endure layers of page referral's and a series of blinking, popping ads. No more. There's now an ad-free LyricWiki.
And another great tool, this one for finding music videos, can be found here.
Minibars are predatory. They always make me feel worse about a good hotel experience. If you take something from the bar you feel guilty and exploited. If you don't, you feel like you're being denied.
But some people must want them, or maybe they make lots for the hotels because they're still pretty common. Fran Golden looks at some new trends in the minibar world.
Ten bucks says this guy is ultimately successful in his plan for getting on a reality show. Truth serum? You've got to be kidding me.
It's in Business, not the Politics section, but if you don't get a chance to see Deval Patrick on NECN this afternoon, you should read Peter Howe's summary.
Even for those of us who initially supported the war, it has become impossible to continue to do so. If the Republicans lose Congress, the war will be one big reason why.
(I did support the war early on, at least agnostically. I trusted that there was real unseen knowledge of WMD, not just worse-case conjecture. I trusted that a plan was in place to rebuild Iraq as the regime was being displaced. I trusted that contingencies were in place for insurgent and factional activity. Of course it's apparent now that that trust was misplaced and I was wrong; conversely, those against the war then were right, even if for the wrong reasons.)
Did I say impossible? Jeff Jacoby continues, at least rhetorically, to support the war by comparing it to other wars: the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War II.
Iraq is not the first war to plummet in popularity. At the start of the Civil War, many Northerners giddily anticipated a quick victory. Secretary of State William Seward "thought the war would be over in 90 days," writes historian David Herbert Donald in his biography of Abraham Lincoln. "The New York Times predicted victory in 30 days."
Jacoby doesn't mention Vietnam. By his reasoning we should still be fighting that war.
Joan Vennocci writes about media coverage of the war and concludes that it's better to know painful things than not. I think we can do without the enemy's perspective but I agree with her general point. After all, despite a lot of great reporting from the field, a good deal of the early support for the war was based on the media coverage. And who knows, maybe it was Judith Miller's great grandfather who made that "victory in 30 days" prediction.
UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis also chose today to write about the evolution of his position on the war and, needless to say, he does it much more eloquently.
Everyone thought that Apple would get its new OS out in January, before Microsoft released Vista. That now doesn't seem the case. But analysts see something interesting coming from Apple in January, possibly new large-display iPods and iPhones. Still, not everyone is enthusiastic.
First it was Billionaires for Bush and now, Inmates for Patrick. You have to laugh at this cartoon version of political theater.
Kim Atkins (who used the city's new wi-fi network to update the Herald) thinks the debate was a tie. I don't know, but then again I was only listening on the radio, missing the visuals. It certainly sounded like Patrick prevailed.
And it was lively. You can't argue with the Globe description of feisty free-for-all.
My tolerance for Mihos has been exhausted. He's become the heckler on the stage and his outbursts and one-liners, entertaining as they sometimes are, make it harder to draw direct comparisons between the frontrunners.
Adam rounds up reaction from bloggers.
From today's Washington Post: an informal survey of political insiders seems to indicate that a healthy respect for reality may be breaking out.
Senior figures in both parties are coming to the conclusion that the Bush administration will be unable to achieve its goal of a stable, democratic Iraq within a politically feasible time frame.
Better late than never, I guess.
It looks like we're going to get our super-trendy Apple store after all. We'll be just like Manhattan.
When it comes to eating seafood, you're dammed if you do and dammed if you don't .
More the latter now, according to a couple of new studies.
Let me get this straight. The gun owners lobby wants more centralized government control over the issuance and tracking of firearm licenses? Apparently so, and Kerry Healey is playing right into their game.
The system of police chiefs' granting firearm licenses isn't perfect, but it does operate on the assumption of local knowledge of who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. That often means that people who want guns don't get them, hence the gun lobby objections.
But it also means scattered and disorganized tracking of gun licenses in the state, something the Second Amendment folks generally see as a good thing.
So I'm not sure what's happening here, but I do know that if Healy is pro-gun lobby it's going to be tough to reconcile that with an anti-violenct crime position.
If you're hooked on Google, this new, humanized search interface may seem like something completely different. I kind of like it, even thought it isn't all that functional.
You know, I think she's really talking to me.
Stop the presses! Roy Lichenstein's paintings are based on comic strips! Real comic strips.
Alex Beam dishes the scoop.
It's not the most pressing political issue, but I hope Question 1 will open up wine sales to supermarkets. Most of the arguments, both for and against, are convenient exaggerations. Kids won't start swilling Pinot Noir (Despite what Eddie Jenkins says), gas stations won't be stocking tequila and the price of wine won't be cut in half.
Mostly it's a question of convenience for consumers. In my case, that will mean being able to get two-buck Chuck at my local Trader Joe's rather than having to trek to Memorial Drive. And that's enough for me.
First, bury the cables. It's only fair.
UPDATE: It can be done, as Charles Swift shows us.
29 year-old grass-roots candidate Ken Procaccianti is trying to unseat Sal Dimasi. He doesn't just have a website, he has a MySpace page with campaign commercial video built around an instant message session. His other videos are up on YouTube.
Cheap but effective.
Apparently there are a lot of angry lawyers out there, upset at the way Kerry Healey's campaign has portrayed their role in the criminal justice system. Many are publicly rallying for Patrick and that's probably what Healey strategists had in mind.
Why do people hate lawyers? I think it's the perception that they will do pretty much anything to win on behalf of their client, including employing underhanded but legal tactics. Sort of like campaign strategists, wouldn't you say?
Before the iPod there was the boom box. There's more information at this site than than anyone, anywhere, needs to know about them.
But if that's not enough, here are some photos of early models.
It's been almost ten years since The Rat shut down. CBGB lasted a bit longer but this weekend it too will be closing. (T-shirts will still be available at the online store.)
Richard Hell reminisces about the club in, of all places, a Times op-ed.
I'm not a big fan of gambling although I bought one of those Mass Lottery season tickets a while back. I tried to pay for it online but there didn't seem to be any way to do so. Interestingly, and wisely I think, they don't allow you to pay for it with a credit card, even at the corner store (although you can use a debit card.)
Legal gambling is, I always thought, a tax on stupidity and desperation. It should be legal but not too easy. Mostly, its harmless unless you're, well, stupid or desperate.
But with last week's bill in Congress banning internet gambling I'm afraid that there might be unintended consequences. The bill restricts the money transfers that support internet gambling. As Robert Cringley notes, with so much money at stake, there will be workarounds, and that's where the unintended consequences come in.
There is, to my knowledge, no center for Al-Qaida hacking, nor is terrorism as an industry big enough to attract much third-party software development. But ally the interests of terrorists and Internet gamblers who all want to be paid, that's a $20 billion incentive to corrupt the world financial system -- an incentive that didn't exist before last week.
Not good. It's never good when Congress tries to legislate the internet and this is a prime example.
I understand that there's a frost warning for the Boston area. Not so much here, although I'll be back in time for that cold blast.
Deval Patrick and Kerry Healey are not only spending money on campaign websites, they've apparently invested in Google ranking as well. Not trusting the normal Google algorithms, the front-runners have insured that they'll top the list by buying placement. Also interesting is that the sites comes up in the "Sponsored Links" section on the right even when you search for the opposition candidate.
Grace Ross and Christy Mihos saved their money and still come up on top in a general search.
Another way to market a campaign on the web is through Wikipedia pages. All the candidates (Heally, Patrick, Mihos, Ross) have them and through anonymous editing, they can make for interesting battlegrounds.
Good point raised by Scott Helman: With a Healey TV ad quoting him saying that Deval Patrick is soft on crime, why isn't Tom Reilly out undoing the damage by publicly supporting his party's candidate?
Then again, the damage doesn't seem to have been very significant judging from the latest polls.
