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I think I get the point that Doug Petersen was trying to make about interdependence, but I'd be a little unhappy, too, if I were one of his Lynn constituents.
And on the subject of whether people from Swampscott are inherently smarter, I'd offer this.
It's an interesting model, testing a social welfare program through private funding before supporting it with public money. The program itself, paying poor people for performance and effort, is sure to draw detractors. But let's see if it works first.
The LAPD is announcing a press event today to unveil a ...flashlight? It may be more significant than it sounds.
Steve Bailey throws down on the importance of covering under-covered communities, especially Dorchester and Roxbury.
There is no higher mission for a local newspaper like the Globe to report on what is happening in neighborhoods like these. You can then decide whether it is your problem or not.
Someone must not have got the memo since there's not one city-centric story on today's Boston Globe front page.
The CSM has a nice, very blog-like analysis piece on Iran's seizure of British soldiers. (Note the many links to outside news sources!)
Some of the websites for City Council candidates running for Jimmy Kelly's seat were obviously designed by friends using Yahoo! or Sitebuilder. (In one case the CSS file links directly into the site for a certain basketball coach.) Others were assembled by pros.
The good news is that they all have webpages, the bad news is, well, among other things, none is a blog. This assessment is of the websites only, not the candidate or message.
Bob Ferrara - Simple layout, plain color scheme, clean menu structure - boring.
Ed Flynn - Nice graphics, sensible layout. Points off for use of the word, "cyberspace."
Brian Mahoney - Amateurish (non-link text underlined, mailto tag attached to a phone number) but unintentionally cutting-edge in its clean simplicity. I like this one.
Mary Cooney - This site does what a campaign website needs to, but not much more.
Bob O'Shea - High production values, photo montage, but ultimately this professionally designed page doesn't jump out from the pack.
Bill Linehan - It looks like the guy who does the yard signs designed the page. Actually, not bad.
Susan Passoni - Another professionally designed site, this page even has some interesting elements, such as an updated events schedule and a video message.
The Track girls are wispering that 'BCN might be moving to a sports-talk format. My experience with the station goes back to the sixties, so in one way I'm sorry to see it go but in another, maybe it's time to put it out of its misery.
The Herald profiles the city council candidates vying for Jimmy Kelly's seat. It's an interesting bunch. I'll pick apart their websites later in the week.
The power equation between musicians and record labels continues to change. This Business Week article brings us up to date while the Times notes the passing of album sets.
Doc Searls repeats a few suggestions for keeping newspapers viable.
If governing an ungovernable city is qualification to be president, Giuliani may have something over the other candidates but not over another, much richer, arguably more successful New York City mayor.
If Bloomberg does decide to get in, it sounds like Al Sharpton will be in his camp.
BMG's David Kravitz is interviewed in the Globe Magazine. The leading question: "Why bother blogging? What are you getting that the mainstream media are missing?" He handles that softball politely.
Needless to say, there's no link provided to his site.
Who's not against the war at this point? According to this poll, seventy percent nation-wide disapprove of the war. More in Massachusetts, I'm guessing.
So why then did only a couple thousand people rally against the war yesterday on a beautiful spring day on the Common? And why did no politicians (zero!) show up to support the most popular cause in the country today? By comparison, tens of thousands lined the streets on a chilly St. Patrick's Day and politicians had to be turned away from a meaningless breakfast. The Flower Show had better attendance than the peace rally.
It's because the protest movement is a mess, hijacked by fringe radicals. With speakers flinging four-letter words from the bandstand, advocating dismantling the state and later, upon seeing police bikes along Tremont Street, exclaim over the PA, "I didn't know pigs could ride bikes," it's no wonder that mainstream (or in this case, all) politicians and most working people stayed away.
No one will admit it, but according to this piece in The Globe, a secret coalition of influential conservatives is unhappy with having a field of Republican candidates for 2008. Rather than let the choice for frontrunner play out in the political marketplace, they want power-brokers to agree on a single candidate and then throw everything behind him.
This was the strategy that pushed McCain out of the race in 2000 and arguably got us to where we are today. It may be wishful thinking but I believe people are less likely to be manipulated this time around.
Deval Patrick's father was a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra! And NRBQ, to boot. It's a strange world.
The Apple iPhone is months away from being available. It hasn't even been approved for use by the FCC. But, if you're the gullible type, you can get one now on eBay for $1125.00. Scam? You bet.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog has more.
A SF Chronicle blogger narrows down the suspects responsible for the Hillary 1984 video to Hillary herself, Hollywood moguls, Arianna Huffington, Steve Jobs or foreign spies.
The Hummer is, apparently, a very green vehicle, much better than the Prius.
In a proxy battle, Clinton and Obama strategists went a few rounds with each other at Harvard last night over the war resolution.
Southeastern Asian fish sauce is an acquired taste but worth it. Today the CSM has a story on the Vietnamese version, nuoc mam.
Trivia: The American version of fish sauce is Worcestershire sauce.
This is some funny, edgy stuff from Chris Rock.
He started out as a prosecutor but William Landay quit law to become a novelist. George V Higgins also started out as a prosecutor and became a writer, although he practiced well into his literary career, leading to those great Kennedy for the defense books.
Landay's second book, The Strangler, is doing well. Time will tell if we have another Higgins on our hands.
The Patrick talking points memo may be a "page out of the Karl Rove playbook" but it's also one of the ways politics is done these days. Will it help? Probably not a lot, but at I don't think it will hurt either.
It's baaacck. This morning, USA Today takes a shot at our poet-laureate situation --and the literary fall out. The article even quotes Carl Stevens now famous poem.
(Postscript: Because Yikes73 made comments on a newspaper bulletin board, that doesn't mean he/she is a blogger as the USA Today writer described him/her. I think one of the criteria of being a blogger would be, you know, having a blog.)
Don't get me wrong, I like NPR. I listen to All Things Considered, Fresh Air, even the goofy weekend quiz shows. But even for a boomer, NPR's tone is too often boring and overly didactic. I can only imagine what Lake Wobegon must sound like to a twenty year old.
But capture that demographic they eventually must. Alex Beam writes about one proposed solution for the transition, a show with a person's name: zach. It would be peppy and relevant, a Gen-X version of NPR.
Even if they get it right, it's still going to sound boring to twenty year olds. And by then they should be shooting for these guys.
Preparing for the business world? It wouldn't hurt at all to study chimpanzee behavior.
One more from the ride home yesterday.
Near the Vietnam War Memorial on Morrissey Blvd.
Snowstorms are not that unusual this late in the season. But there's something about post-daylight savings time snow that just seems wrong. Oh well, we have things like this to look forward to.
Friday night was the worst commute ever. Two and a half hours from Roxbury to Quincy. I took some photos I took on the way.
Outbound, nothing's moving.
Making snowballs on the windowsill in South Boston.
The wind was whipping the snow at Wollaston Beach.
Visibility was poor along the beach.
It was also pretty blustery by the water at Malibu Beach along Morrisey Boulevard.
One of the best hotels for geeks is nearby, the Hotel @ MIT. Not much of a surprise.
Here's a list which includes, strangely enough, The Wynn in Vegas.
Jon Keller's on Patrick's political malaise:
My nervous caller says the same thing other insiders say: Patrick’s game plan doesn’t appear to include aggressive reinforcement of his core campaign message – that he’ll go in and shake up Beacon Hill to wring out better results for working folks...
Not good. I'm optimistic that things will even out -- it's only been a few months, after all -- but people will only hang in there for so long.
This Times story made me wonder about where an older crowd congregates in the Boston area.
There's plenty of humor potential in this year's Saint Patrick's Day breakfast. Expect jokes about Cadillacs and curtains.
And now Tim Cahill has sparked a political scandal over who's writing his jokes for the breakfast. It turns out he enlisted the agency that produces the state lottery ads to provide a few one-liners. After all that trouble, they better be good.
I haven't paid much attention, but are the lottery ads that funny? They're not very popular on YouTube.
I don't know if Hill Holiday had anything to do with designing the Lottery website. But if they did, I guess that would qualify as funny -in a so-bad-it's-funny kind of way.
I know now that The Globe website had some technical problems this morning, but until I figured that out it was a little disorientating to think that it was February again. First these stories on buying flowers for Valentines Day (which induced a panic) and then this cartoon.
I guess I haven't figured out the formula that The Globe uses to determine what goes on its front page. The fact the some people listen to some of their music on low quality speakers is, well, less than compelling news. But there it is.
Is there something new going on here? I doubt it. Folks have always traded portability for quality -- as in transistor radios -- and today people from all generations still like high quality sound when it's available, -- as in big money car stereos. And what about the people on the subway with those giant home stereo headphones attached to their ipods?
On the quality of MP3 issue, cassettes were also a step down in fidelity from records, but they offered portability at good enough quality levels. Eventually they improved, as will digital files.
Jay Fitzgerald, writing in the Herald, exposes a disconnect in our immigration policy. Jeff Jacoby, thinking along the same lines, ends his column with a good analogy:
If tens of millions of drivers consistently break the interstate speed limit, do we assume that they are all criminals who should lose their licenses and be banned from the highways? No: A more plausible explanation is that the speed limit is too low for safe highway driving and ought to be raised. By the same token, if hundreds of thousands of immigrants come here illegally each year, is it realistic to conclude that we have a massive crime problem for which a ferocious crackdown is the only solution? Perhaps it is the case instead that America's immigration quotas are simply too low for the world's most dynamic economy. And perhaps the persistent influx of industrious workers is not a plague to be cursed, but a blessing to be better managed.
I don't often agree with Jacoby but he certainly gets this one right.
Boston's St. Patrick's Day Parade is the second largest in the US, at least according to Wacko Hurley.
New York's is the biggest, no arguments there. But Holyoke is claiming to be number two, ahead of Boston. Not likely. A more legitimate claim to the second biggest parade comes from Savannah -- yes, Savannah Georgia -- where they go all out with their St Pat's parade. (They certainly have a better parade website than Boston's.)
Although we're probably not number two, we do have bragging rights. According to Wikipedia, Boston's parade was the first ever, held in 1737 and organized by the Charitable Irish Society.
According to this Globe article the average Comcast broadband internet user downloads about a gigabyte a month. But if all Comcast users downloaded a gig a month, the network would slow dramatically for everyone.
And then there are the power users, responsible for high volume downloads. Even though they're paying Comcast for unlimited use, they risk being shut off because they slow the network for everyone else.
There's a common denominator here: a slow network. Instead of blaming it's users, Comcast should build out their network to support the claims they make for it.
We have John McSheffrey to thank for this otherwise unseen vignette of an all too common homecoming. If you don't have the time to read the all of the Sunday papers, make time to read this.
Just as there's a market for World War II books and crime novels and historical biographies etc., there's a market out there for books on physics. Not equation laden textbooks but books for lay folks that, in (usually) understandable language, lay out the most recent developments. Although I was very poor in science in school, I can't get enough of this stuff.
These popular science books also provide a forum for physicists to promote their favored theories to the general public and sometimes it's hard for non-scientists to reconcile the competing views.
I read Lisa Randall's Warped Passages and Leonard Suskind's book on the Cosmic Landscape and came away convinced that string theory was the future of physics. Then I read The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin and became equally convinced that the theory was misguided.
I just finished Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (don't be put off by the marketing inspired sci-fi titles) by Alex Vilenkin and my faith in string theory has been restored. The book doesn't get into the esoteric details of string theory or make arguments one way or another, but it lays a broad groundwork for the landscape view that is at the heart of the most recent version of the theory.
It's one of the clearest books on the mind-boggling, almost philosophical developments in physics that I've read in a long time. For example, before the Big Band there was nothing, no space, no time. But he describes what scientists think that nothing was as well as the rules governing the nothing that came even before that. It sounds like heavy stuff, I know, but if I can digest it, most anyone can.
Now it's time for a nice simple novel.
Say goodbye to a dubious anniversary. I could have been a billionaire by now.
If you didn't think Obama supporters could play hardball, check out this imaginative (and probably copyright violating) video. I know it's been around for a while, but I'm just catching up to it.
Because, among other things, Patrick's party controls the legislature, a political scientist concludes that he's the most politically powerful governor in the country. (via Blue Mass Group.)
Not so fast. It's not about the party that controls the legislature, it's the guys who control the party that control the legislature. And I wouldn't be surprised if those guys wouldn't like to slice off a bit of that power for themselves.
Another high profile front page Patrick mis-step. Was that a short honeymoon or no honeymoon?
I recall the beginning of Clinton's first term when, with three and a half years to go, negative stories, some substantive and some not, were threatening the administration. James Fallows summarizes the media coverage at the time:
Four months after Bill Clinton's inauguration, the verdicts were in: He had failed disastrously as a leader and his administration was for all practical purposes at an end. In early June, Time published its cover story on "The Incredible Shrinking Presidency," and Newsweek's cover showed a picture of Clinton with the caption, "What's Wrong?" The Washington Post ran a front page story presenting Clinton as a case study of what it means to use up your "political capital." A New York Times editorial asked "Can the Democrats Govern?" and a Times columnist wrote, "Four months into a new presidency, people who voted for it are wondering if it can be saved."...
A lot of those stories were like drape-gate, caddy-gate and now podcast-gate, more a symptom of a lack of a media strategy than anything else. Nonetheless, there was blood in the water.
Then Clinton did a smart thing. He brought in David Gergen, a professional and an insider, to develop a media strategy, and those shaky early days became a footnote, all but forgotten now.
An old, noisy elevated highway running through the city's downtown? An expensive plan to remove it and replace it with a tunnel? Don't tell me Bechtel is in the bidding.
It's uncanny. Seattle really should give Boston a call before moving on this.
I like The Simpsons a lot, but it doesn't exactly portray a model society. Despite this, our own Springfield wants the honor of being tied to the series and hopes to host the premiere of The Simpsons movie.
"It's an opportunity to showcase what is so great about this city," Azell Murphy Cavaan, the city's community relations director, said yesterday.
That, for example, it's not controlled by someone like Montgomery Burns, there aren't errant pieces of radioactive material bouncing around downtown, a Chief Wiggum isn't shooting people first and not asking any questions period, later. Yes. These are the things that make a city great.
This is an interesting look into how smell and sleep enhance memory retention.
Yeah, I kinda wondered about that too.
Granted, Blue Mass Group is a group and there's lots of comment discussion, but it's only one blog and one blog does not constitute an -osphere.
If you've been immersed in a conference, as I have, you'll know that there should be takeaways. At some point, based on the available skill-sets, you'll have to apply methodologies to produce deliverables, arrived at through action items. And you should introduce performance metrics to assure that your stake-holders are getting added value.
When did we all start talking like this?
My pet peeve is the use of methodology in place of method. Sure, it has more syllables but unless you're talking about the study of methods, just use method.
Proponents of drug legalization tend to be utopian in their vision of how that would work out. Opponents are equally dystopian.
There's an interesting experiment playing out on the west coast where California medical marijuana laws have led to the establishment of hundreds of marijuana stores, ostensibly for medical use but more commonly servicing recreational drug users.
Needless to say, things have not gone as planned.
Hell hath no fury like a disappointed electorate.
Unfortunately, without the grassroots support that got him elected (moonbats and all), Patrick won't have the power to wheel and deal with the leaders in the legislature. If there's a sign of weakness, those guys will walk all over him. And us.
Steve Bailey notes that while running for governor Patrick was pretty savvy. He didn't drive a flashy car, he resigned from Ameriquest, etc. Ultimately he presented an image that convinced a lot of voters he had the right stuff.
Eileen McNamara writes that Patrick can't be completely unaware of how important appearances are in politics.
If symbolism matters when he stages his swearing-in on the steps of the State House, then it matters when he chooses a Cadillac as his official car.
You would think.
Both McNamara and Joan Vennochi compare Patrick's recent political judgement to... Tom Reilly's. Ouch.
The people who advised Patrick during the campaign should get up to the State House - stat. Whoever is advising him now isn't serving him well.
I'm writing from a different time zone so, although I'm still getting up early, it's later than usual. I'm also using a spotty hotel connection so not all the posts are getting through.
Although the administration won't admit it, 'Plan B' is withdrawing the troops and that's off the table. So, for public discussion sake at least, it's 'Plan A' or the highway.
Hopefully, there's a 'Plan C' out there somewhere.
UPDATE: Jay has a much better analysis.
I'm just getting to the Phoenix article on our New England fixation with Dunkin Donuts. Lots of interesting tidbits. I didn't know there were franchises in Bulgeria and South Korea.
But the theme of the article is coffee as identity.
...[L]ook at the Starbucks in Central Square, and compare it to the Dunkin’ Donuts just across Mass Ave. In one, piped-in music percolates down and steam ascends ephemerally from behind a granite counter. Well-dressed people sit in upholstered chairs, squinting into placidly glowing laptops. In the other, folks line up in a spare and sterile space, brightly lit by fluorescent bulbs. They place an order perfunctorily — perhaps, on Valentine’s Day, an old man pauses for a moment to flirt with his favorite cashier. They get their coffee and their food. And they leave. Coffee as fuel. Coffee as lifestyle. Which you choose is up to you, but very few people choose both.
A personal statement? And here I was thinking it was about the coffee. My opinion on the subject is this: coffee is like beer. Sometimes you want to savor a microbrew and sometimes you want to be refreshed with a Bud Light. Dunkin Donuts is the Bud Light of coffee. And I like Bud Light.
But read the article. There's a lot of good information.
Howie Carr is such a nice guy. He always takes the high road in his columns, never resorting to tough guy, cheap shot, desperate attempt at humor, attacks on his subjects. Now radio competitor Tom Finneran is making derisive jokes about poor Howard. I'm sure this is very upsetting to the man.
Thank goodness that a colleague, Laurel Sweet, has stepped up on Howard's behalf to write a front page story about this injustice.
Lots of people have posted photos of the lunar eclipse.
I was afraid this would happen. So let's designate our Boston poet laureate and get it over with. Otherwise we'll get more headlines like this. And this. Not to mention this (linked earlier to by Adam Gaffin in a post that references it's own share of scary local verse)
But that's not all. The story has inspired the following works, each of which give William McGonagall a run for his money...
Harry Forbes, rhyming about the World Economic Forum:
Mr. Jordan’s been to Davos.
What he saw there just might salve us.
Clinton, Jolie, Blair, and Bono,
Diversity of sapiens homo...
A GOP News State House political limerick:
There once was a Governor Patrick
Black liberal from Harvard - a hat trick
Has no clue what to do
He's a victim - Boo Hoo
But we're stuck with him now - isn't that sick.
Brian McGrory, also working in limerick form.
There once was a guy in City Hall
Who, in government, never stood very tall.
He offered these plans
That never had many fans.
What he mostly had was a lot of gall.
(I'd say his Iambic pentameter needs some serious work.)
From Scott Allen Miller (also via Universal Hub)
I once walked
To Chinatown and back
I got robbed twice
And offered four vials of crack
Check out the whole thing and scroll down to the comments, where you'll find gems like this.
Tom Finneran took a long gander
At districts he could gerrymander
But a lie to the court
Cut his law career short
So on RKO now he must pander
And from a Globe editorial referencing a Boston.com commenter:
"Rub a dub dub. . . / Get me out the Hub!"
No mas!
Here's more on a Boston poet laureate from Charles Swift.
(The post title, by the way, for those who don't know, is from Midsummer Night's Dream.)
The folks at Chocolate Cake City have done it again. (Via Universal Hub.)
Now there's no evidence that a Democratic competitor played any role in promoting or planting this information. But I do find the timing and nuance of the story, shall we say, interesting.
Jay Fitz is back from a short hiatus and writing about stews and red sauce recipes. I enjoyed the linked article on the Quest for a Red Sauce. (Actually, as my East Boston friends tell me, a red sauce with meat isn't a sauce -- it's a gravy.) In the last few years I've tried to stay away from carbs and the biggest thing I've missed is spending a weekend afternoon working on sauce gravy for pasta.
Hmmm. I think today might be a good day to break out.
Conservatives are starting to realize that they're going to have to hold their noses and embrace one of the the three, Giuliani, McCain or Romney. From this morning's Times:
... [T]he candidates they may be more inclined to support — Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas — are generally seen as being longer-shots to winning the nomination...
Romney, more than the other two, seems willing and able to speak their language. But it's still an open question as to how much influence the hard-core right will have in the primaries. Disillusion with the war may be pushing many conservatives in toward the center.
UPDATE: BMG has this on the new opposition brand: Rudy McRomney.
Another day, another Globe hyperlink issue, but it's not the usual complaint.
In a story about how a woman, attempting to renew her license online, was scammed by (what the Registry claims is) a web spoof, The Globe broke its habit of not providing relevant links by helpfully providing a link to the scammer's site. I'm not sure this is progress.
The spoof in question really wasn't a spoof, it was one of zillions of 'buyer beware' scams on the internet. The woman was simply fooled by the scam site's placement on Google.
Now, by providing the link, The Globe insures that the scammer's Google ranking will increase.
It's probably not healthy for politics as a whole but it will be fascinating to watch the war honed Clinton machine take on Obama. And there's always the possibility of a colossal backfire.
Tom Reilly more than implied that the Big Dig collapse was criminal but then he left Martha Coakley to make the case.
So, what if there is no case? Coakley risks looking ineffective, right?
Not if there were someone else out in front, someone like, say, a special prosecutor.
It's the Herald's turn on links. A story on how the city posted the names of trash scofflaws to the web doesn't have a link but does supply a URL -- one at least close to the page referenced. C+.
(Here's the page. Most of the trash code enforcement violators are individuals or local businesses but one name jumps out: Sony Music Entertainment. I guess they produce a lot of trash.)
Paul McMorrow deconstructs February and it ain't pretty.
It wasn't just the idea that feeding roadkill to the homeless was bad that scuttled a plan to do just that in Connecticut. It was because it costs seventy bucks to process the dear after it has been hit.
Either way...
With lukewarm response to the budget proposal, Joan Vennochi wonders:
...Does Patrick understand the entrenched power of the political and corporate establishment and what it takes to shake it?
She's right, the "Together we can" stuff won't play for long in the real-world hardball arena, if it plays at all.
Nice profile of Jay Greene, one of the best detectives in the city.
In China, although rural schools are generally available, poor farmers often don't have money for pencils. Jehangir Pocha begins this report from Guizhou Province with an example of a women who solves the problem by selling her blood to pay for her children's school supplies.
Why didn't someone think of this earlier. Global climate change problems could be easily solved, simply by applying alien technology.
