Berkshire Sense

If I Started Posting Again...

2010-10-09T02:02:00.001-04:00

...would anybody be paying attention?

The New Hotness

2008-12-17T00:42:00.003-05:00

I resisted for as long as I could, but I'm on Facebook now.

Facebook is the new MySpace, which was the new Blogspot, which was the new Friendster, which was the new LinkedIn...which was, I dunno, the new Honda Civic with a bag of Fritos in the back seat.

Social networking sites are pretty cool in that you can catch up with people that you remember from way back when and see what they look like now. You hope they look a little older than you, but not too old, and that your kids are cuter than theirs, but that in general they're within 10 smidgens of your own particular happiness level. Too happy, and you want to smack 'em. Too sad, and you just don't want to deal with the bummerdom.

I've reconnected with family, with folks from most of my old bands, from high school, college, my time in Boston and New York, and my new friends here. It's kinda cool, thinking about old connections restored and that sort of thing. Real time updates and pointless pics and videos and links to stupid stories. And I don't have to come up with 800 words, a unique point of view, and a catchy turn of phrase. I can just post something like "I tried out for a play at the Main Street Stage this weekend and they politely told me to go pee up a rope"...and that's it. No annoying anonymous comments, no worries that someone's going to give me a pile and a half of crap. No, I'm leaving the internet pissing contests to the Topix posters over at the Transcript web site--have fun eating each over there, y'all--and if I get the notion to share some brain motion I'll drop some commotion into the blogspot ocean.

Til then, see you elsewhere.

Rules, Money, Guns, and Issues

2008-09-16T11:53:00.001-04:00

Each alternate November, the American public--most of which does not care about this sort of thing on a regular basis--is bombarded with information about a pack of candidates' records, characters, families, religions, and alcoholic beverages of choice. Every other autumn, candidates try to impress with their ability to debate, and look confident while giving a speech, and knowing some civics and history and a few foreign capital cities. Get enough name recognition together, get a few media people saying nice things about you, deflect the mean things the other media people are saying about you, and make your opponents seem vaguely worse, somehow, than you, and...congratulations! You now go off to your state's or country's capital city and represent your constituency with a mandate from the masses.

Once you're actually there, are you competing with other election winners on the things that got you elected? Is it like a tournament?

No, it's like government. And government is really about three things and three things only: rules, money, and guns. That's why government exists. There is nothing else for it to do but make up rules, hand out money, and shoot off the guns.

So how does a nice set of teeth, a fashionable but not ostentatious wardrobe, and experience smiling at pancake breakfasts qualify anyone to legislate, appropriate, and militarily gesticulate?

Is it just me, or is there a disconnect between the job of government and the way we give these jobs out?

Is it just that I'm paying too much attention to this particular question during the aerial bombardment of pointless information surrounding this November's cycle? Why do I even know what Jane Swift thinks about comments that Barack Obama made about Sarah Palin that weren't even about Sarah Palin (or...maybe they were...a little...it's hard to say for sure)? Why do I know the names of Biden's kids? Obama's pastor? The brand of prescription drug Cindy McCain went into rehab for?

How on earth do the people who come out with the most votes via this ridiculous process get to go out and try to make up the rules, dole out the money, and aim the ordnance?

I want to get mad at the participants, but there's no point in blaming the winners. It's not like they're making up the rules. Oh wait--they ARE, aren't they? That seems like kind of a deviation from the ideal design, there.

No, still, though while the technical details may differ from year to year, the basic process hasn't changed since the mid nineteenth century. And every time we go through it, there are winners, and there are losers, and the procedural details are surveyed and dissected and discussed like each election was a game from the '86 World Series. The pundits and commentators huff and puff and the talk radio callers and bloggers urge us to blow the house down, but we never do. No, every time around we beg to be influenced by contrived outrage and gaffes and gotcha questions and non-denial denials.

And then we complain when our system doesn't work the way we want it to. Why? Because 35% of the country marches to one specific set of foolhardy platitudes, 35% trudges along to a set of attractively packaged yet fallacious principles, and the best part of the rest simply pay no attention. Basically most of us have made up our minds long before any of the candidates were selected, or we vote in a district where it's a foregone conclusion who's going to win anyway.

As for the few TRUE difference makers, how many of them are grandmas who vote on looks? One-issue voters whose only criteria for giving their vote is abortion or gun control? Racists or chauvinists who wouldn't ever vote for a black guy or a woman?

Do issues matter?

Have they ever mattered?

It Just Struck Me...

2008-08-30T00:53:00.003-04:00

...Sarah Palin == Jane Swift with slightly better karma.

Notes From The First Month of Fatherhood

2008-08-05T22:09:00.009-04:00

The first month is in the books. Piper was born four Tuesdays ago; we've been home from the hospital for a bit over two weeks now. The word that rings the most with me is "grueling", but grueling in a different way than, say, a business trip to Grand Rapids, or a good case of the runs.

I haven't slept more than five hours straight since Tara went into the hospital 31 days ago today.

I've got the debris of several dozen cardboard boxes worth of flat-pack furniture, strollers, playpens, and assorted baby ordnance in a big pile in the living room. My adorable little daughter does little apart from eat, sleep, and project various substances from inside her body onto whatever shirt I happen to be wearing.

I'm able to translate the eight or nine versions of the only word she's able to come out with to this point--"waaaaah"--and have cured the nastiest (that is to say, only) case of diaper rash I've ever seen (for those interested: corn starch, airing it out, and lots of those absorbent pads whose primary purpose is for housebreaking puppies). She stops crying when we hold her, feed her, burp her (I did not realize quite how long THAT process was going to end up taking), or swaddle her, and for the most part pretty much stays where we put her.

She, like her parents, is nocturnal. While she sleeps through most of the day like a diapered sausage in the sun, her 1:00 and 5:00am feedings turn into these marathon rock-a-bye-baby sessions before she finally accepts being put down without version #4 of "waaaah"--the one that means "you ain't done holding and rocking me, sucka. Oh no you ain't."

But the whole of it is just postscript when she opens those eyes and stares at you. I mean, look: I've seen a lot of ugly babies, you know? Hate to say it, but it's true. Not every baby is cute; that's all there is to it. And while I'm possibly biased, I really think, by all objective measures, that my daughter is truly in the top 5% of the overall baby cuteness rankings:

Would this face lie to you?
So yeah, I'd write more, including the story of Piper's high-level meetings with the mayor, our state representative, and junior US Senator/unelected Presidential candidate, but I think I hear good ol' waaaah #4 coming from the bassinet to my left. Time to spring, albeit slowly and wearily, into action.

Thanks to everyone, by the way, for their thoughts and best wishes. More as she--and we--continue to develop.

The Early Bird Catches Your Heart

2008-07-08T12:54:00.011-04:00

She was supposed to be here at the end of August.

She was supposed to have "North Adams" on her birth certificate, not "Springfield".

She was supposed to have followed a carefully deliberated "birth plan".

She did none of these things.

But the one major thing she was supposed to do--capture us completely and make us swear everlasting love and concern for her well-being--well, this, she has done. In spades.

Happy 0th birthday, Piper. Welcome aboard. Hold on tight.

Several Things That Would Seem To Be Obvious

2008-06-24T21:22:00.009-04:00

A note on the election: Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic nomination because she made some strategic decisions that just plain turned out to be wrong. In politics as in sports as in life, the team that made the fewer mistakes won. She was defeated by neither sexism nor her Senate record nor husband Bill. She couldn't make up for a bad first half, ran out of time, and lost a close one at the buzzer. In the end, too many kids and eggheads saw inspiration in the other guy, and they barely edged out her base of women, guys with lunchpails, and folks who would never, ever vote for a black guy.

She almost won, but whiffing on a few basic tactics that I don't need to list out probably made the difference. And if you can't run a campaign, you're probably going to have a hard time running a country, so while I empathize with Senator Clinton and her supporters, I have to disagree with those who think the wrong person ended up winning.

The retail price of a gallon of gasoline is the result of a complex set of variables that no single political or economic tactic will affect more than temporarily. But any discussion of oil pricing that does not start with the devaluation of the US Dollar is flawed from the outset.

Oil market price benchmarks are all in US Dollars, which means that if a dollar is worth less--20% this last 12 months alone--it's going to cost more of them to buy the same amount of anything. Basically, you start out having to pay $1.20 for your dollar draft beer--with all other market conditions remaining equal.

Then during a currency devaulation, big investors buy commodities (oil, gold, or frozen concentrated orange juice...Winthorp), whose prices go up, and then you have irrational exuberance over a new market bubble. Of course there's a monstrous jump in wholesale prices. And again, this is even before you even start talking about fundamentals of supply and demand.

Now, once the many hands downstream of this start sticking themselves into the river of fake money to pad resale prices, we end up where we are now. You can reduce oil company taxes, drill in ANWR, build refineries, give everyone an electric car, or have the Saudis turn the hose on full-blast. You'd just be diddling around with a market that just needs people to get real and start changing the way they think about their relationship with fossil fuel.

The Internet and the 24-hour news cycle are driving a new style of debate, and it's not one I'm digging particularly. Look: I'm quite aware that there was never some mythical, mist-enshrouded Golden Age where the Internet was devoid of douchebaggery. I'm quite aware that uninformed, factually incorrect, or prejudiced opinions have always existed. But at this point, the vast majority of comment-enabled websites are nothing more than digital repositories of half of any population yelling at the other half. It's all smug self-satisfaction versus shrill self-righteousness, mixed with obvious difficulty distinguishing fact and opinion, with a dash of overconfidence in one's ability to predict the future. Top it off with straw men, slippery slopes, and a healthy glop of outrage, then wrap it in a forum where you aren't held accountable for anything you say. No, I hope you understand if I just push that plate away and ask for a green salad instead.

To wrap up with a should-be-obvious culinary topic: guys and gals, a "slider" is not just a small cheeseburger. Nowadays every corner beanery puts a meatball on a finger roll with pepper jack and "chi-pol-tay" (urgh!) mayo and calls it a slider. Don't get me wrong: I love mini-cheeseburgers, but if I have to drive these people to the nearest White Castle (or Krystal, if you're south-facing) and slide a couple fifty-nine-cent steamers down their necks myself, then stop at Staples to get some white-out for their menus, dammit, I will.

Coding for Fun and Profit

2008-05-19T00:34:00.002-04:00

Usually I'll read an article or letter to the editor and say to myself, "Boy, I really oughta write a Pulitzer Prize-winning blog post about that," and then immediately fail to do so. I've been pretty consistent about this, and in my mind at least, consistency counts for something. But this article seems to have done something to remove my thumb from its previously dark and comfortable resting place.

The gist of Ms. Atwell's iBerkshires.com piece: Looks like MCLA put on a secondary school programming contest and nobody came. Well, not nobody. A team from Pittsfield High came up, as did the Fightin' New Lebanese (I guess) from New Lebanon, NY. I mean, two schools.

public class WhatIsThis {
   public static void main (String args[]) {
      System.out.println("Pathetic.");
   }
}

You know what I'm talking about. If you don't, call a high schooler in New Lebanon.

I don't get it. I really don't. I've been working in IT for pretty much the last twenty years and I know of almost no other business where the only thing that matters is the quality of your output. You don't need to have gone to a great school, or married the boss' niece; you don't need good personal hygiene, social skills, or a wardrobe containing anything made after 2002. All you need is the chops, and you will be ridiculously employable for the foreseeable future.

One of the reasons programming jobs are being offshored is that thousands of Indian and Chinese secondary schools know something that apparently we do not: expertise in information technology work can transcend deficiencies in geography, capital, and infrastructure. It can be taught and learned cheaply, with minimal equipment, and the Internet--the greatest real-time educational resource ever created--gives you the ability to exercise and expand your skills any time, almost anywhere in the world. Seriously: if you can't find a code snippet to crib for your programming homework, you need to start thinking about bailing and taking a pottery class.

I have nothing against the hospitality, arts, arts management, or retail industries. But if America's rural and cash-strapped urban school systems started really pushing a practical IT curriculum they'd be giving immeasurable head starts to thousands of American kids. And if local governments spent as much time wooing IT-based businesses as they did big box stores, they'd be providing the head-of-household jobs that smaller municipalities need to grow and thrive.

I know a lot of folks got scared off by the bubble a few years back, but that doesn't blow the fundamentals of a good idea well executed by a smart company. The tech company money that vanished betwen 1999 and 2003 was mostly idiot money, and you could kinda tell the cranio-rectally inverted companies from the solid ones pretty quickly. Suffice to say that those times have shaken out and you're a whole lot less likely to be put through that again. Lack of confidence in the industry should not be a factor.

And coming up with that last pronoun gets me to thinking how there needs to be a push to get the girls into the game. I know a few great programmers who happen not to be in possession of a pair of testes--of their own, anyway--and anyone who tells you girls aren't as good at it is simply a few semicolons short of a successful compile. How exactly would we do that? Well, same way you get boys interested: raise awareness, incentivize, and above all, make it fun. Games are a great starting point, as are other non-stodgy stuff like social networking or multimedia. And try this angle: writing code is a form of creation, like art, music, or literature. Pitch it to the creative types as a medium--like watercolors or clay or the cello--and tell them that they can use it to generate things from the mundane to the outrageous; from the practical to the beautiful and everything between. And you can make a living at it. It's certainly easier trying to get paid for coding than it is for, say, sculpting.

The great advances we're seeing right here in North Adams and across western Massachusetts with laptops and connectivity should just be the tip of the iceberg. It is a good step to give our kids computers and teach them how to be end-users. It would be a GREAT step to teach them how to be programmers. It's so obviously the right thing to do that I'm really seriously interested in hearing from people who disagree with me on this, to see what sort of possible crackpot argument there could be against it.

And this is the perfect medium for it. Thank God for the Internet, eh? Well, no--thank a bunch of programmers.

Requiem

2008-05-17T01:39:00.011-04:00

I thought the big news on the personal front this month was going to be the swapout of the old car for the new one, but the truth is much sadder than that. Last Monday the 5th, I got a call from my mother informing me of my father's passing.

The week that followed was pretty tough, as I'm sure anyone who's gone through it can attest. Like many of my gender I am not comfortable with big displays of emotion, and this sort of thing is just a minefield of grief and gratitude and compassion and concern, and boy, did I step on all of them.

I miss my father. I worry about my mother. I am grateful to my kind and caring wife and to all of my friends and family who've taken the time to console and commiserate. I grieve that my child will only know my father as an abstraction. I am soothed by the knowledge that his last moments were spent outside the house he had proudly bought and maintained with his own two hands for 39 years, on a warm spring evening, putting pebbles in the bottom of a window box into which he was about to plant a bunch of four o'clocks.

At the end of the day, though, there's no silver lining to it; no overarching life lesson to be gleaned; no redemption after having come out the other side. It's just sadness, and loss, and the unfailing presence of a hole in your soul that cannot ever be repaired.

Well...maybe there are a few things. Maybe there's some perspective to be gained, about appreciating life and the people in it (some of them, anyway). Or maybe there's a newfound appreciation for legacy and family. And the gaining of empathy. Or at the very least, you never have to dread that the next phone call from home will be the one that bears that particular Bad News.

But that is cold comfort, each thought more bitter than the last, and without even an imagined hint of sweet. The only thing I can reasonably do is simply what my father would have wanted me to do: live on fearlessly, raise my family lovingly, and teach my children to be as hard working, honest, and honorable as he wanted me to be.

So that's what I will do.

That, and I will plant those four o'clocks, opening up to face the sun on golden summer afternoons, in his memory.

Ode to a Crescent Roll

2008-04-08T21:54:00.001-04:00

Alhough you are flaky
and somewhat delicious
there is something irksome about your
vaguely petrochemical taste
and indeterminate origin
from a dough perspective, at least.

How DO you keep for three months?

I have always felt, deep inside
that I could make a better dinner roll than you
with my own hands, but
your genuine ease of preparation
and sixteen-to-nineteen minute baking time
has made it difficult for me to justify supplanting you
with a creation of my own concoction.

I mean, people seem to like you, as well.

Still, the folks at Pillsbury want me to think all this
and I feel as though contributing to the sales figures
of refrigerated bake-at-home dinner rolls
will make some executives happy
though it gives me little joy
that I cannot best you with homemade dough.

It gives me a sense of despair
that you have given rise to these feelings
yet I am willing to forgive
as I place butter on your backside
bite, chew thoroughly, swallow
and repeat until all your loafmates are gone.

So Long, Cupcake

2008-03-27T18:19:00.003-04:00

Normally, getting the scoop on a food service establishment closing is blogroll amigo Greg Roach's specialty, but there's some buzzing around town about Molly's Bakery on Eagle Street coming to the end of the line.

They're looking for a buyer, but are planning on ceasing operations on Saturday. This is the buzz downtown reported by People Who Have Been Telling A Lot Of Other People.

I hope this is not true, as there are several cupcakes from just yesterday in the kitchen right now, and they're lovely, and I would truly doubt that the cupcakes made on an industrial baked-good assembly line (*cough* Big Y *cough*) could hold a candle to them. And a Beach Party or Fall Foliage weekend without fried dough? Why? How?

Still, we'll find out once the intrepid investigative journalists at the North Adams Transcript confirm or deny the story....although if it's not true I doubt there'd be much reason to run a story saying "Some Local Bigmouth's Blog Was Wrong About Local Bakery Running Out Of Dough".

From what I know about cupcakes, if you wrap 'em well enough, they'll freeze for a month or two before they start coming out tasting funny. Stock up, kids. More on this as it develops.

UPDATE: This one turns out to be true. Click here for the Transcript story. So, aloha oe, Molly's. You will be missed.

This Whole Baby Thing, Continued

2008-03-20T22:21:00.007-04:00

This is great: Tara's started a baby blog, or actually a real virtual baby shower, over at babyjacobs.blogspot.com. Yes, I said "real virtual"; it's not a contradiction if you expand the meanings of both of the words. Anyway, yes--it's like a real baby shower. You know, balloons, singing, cake eating--all of those are things you can be doing while you're reading the blog.

There are games, stories, contests, and the like. We're having a baby pool, the winner of which gets a fabulous prize. But remember, it's not about winning and losing. It's about participation...and losing.

Feel free to pop on over and sign the guestbook and give the advice and check in on the progress. Plus, welcome Tara to the blogosphere. Maybe she'll stick around afterwards and tell us what she thinks about windmills and casinos. Or restaurants. She definitely has opinions on some of the local chow houses, for sure.

And welcome our child to cyberspace, too. I like to think that 17 or so years from now, Li'l Peanut will be able to look up this old stuff, read what was said about him/her by loving parents, family, and friends...and be as embarrassed as s/he would be if we showed a bare-ass baby-in-the-bathtub picture to his/her junior prom date. And make no mistake, Poindexter, we WILL have bare-ass baby-in-the-bathtub photos. Mua ha ha ha.

As for the two of us grownups, the nesting urge combined with the winter hibernating urge has basically resulted in us...um...hibernesting...for the majority of the past season or so. Lots of doing stuff inside while the Berkshire snow, ice, and mud have made venturing outside an unappealing proposition.

On the other side of that rather lethargic coin, we've gotten the kitchen pretty close to finished. So I've really been getting my mise en place on with the help of our cool stove, a white 1952 Chambers Model 90C, rescued from a house in South Jersey whose owner began lusting after a brand new Viking. Feel free to insert your favorite tasteless "hot Norseman" double entendre here.

But call it reconnecting with my Inner Hashslinger. Cooking is a very humbling experience. It's a lot like golf, in fact. You have to execute; you know how to, and you've done it a thousand times, but every few shots you just blow it to hell and send an 8-inch clod of something foul-tasting towards your partner. So while most of it is a pleasant experience, at the end of the round you're always wishing you got around more on that standing rib roast or not hooked that asparagus souffle into the drink. Sometimes you get the course; sometimes the course gets you, and at the end of the day you're standing there wet, with a spatula in your hand, wondering what the hell went wrong.

I made a spinach and phyllo pie tonight, for instance, that came out like an overweight, pissed-off quiche with a chronic lung condition. It wasn't inedible, but it wasn't really what I was shooting for. Kinda like sinking a birdie putt on the 5th green after teeing off from the 4th.

But I'll be up and swinging for the next day's challenge, as this whole fatherhood thing will undoubtedly prove to be.

So I'll just wrap up this paean to overwrought metaphors by trusting that like all the other fathers in the world, I'll do what I can to knock it stiff, sink it in one, and pick up a round for the house at the end of another honorable day.

This Whole Baby Thing, Explained

2008-03-03T00:26:00.012-05:00

Most of you know by now, but it bears repeating if you don't: Tara and I, or actually mostly Tara, are in the advanced stages of the breeding process.

(Here is where you say, in the language of our ancestors, "Hey, mazel tov, dude." Apparently, our ancestors were notoriously informal.)

But yeah, thanks. Looking at late August or early September. We've had a few tests so far, and things are pretty much where they should be (perform superstitious action of your choice); we even have pictures. In fact, here is a picture of Tara, or more accurately a picture of the inside of one of Tara's organs, where you can clearly see some gray and white splotches on a black background, and the word "Profile" with some numbers and letters:

Obviously this looks like it could be anything from an X-ray of a turkey leg to an 8th grade art project. But thanks to some advanced medical imaging technology--I believe lasers and nanotubes or something were involved--we were able to really enhance the results. I think we had to pay extra for this, but really, it's worth it. Anyway, this is probably a more accurate picture of our child at this point:

We were heartened to see what specialists call "Fonzie's sign", where the clenched fist and upturned thumb indicate advanced development of the fetal "cool" system. Ayyyyyyy.

Yeah, this does not bode well for classy humor going forward. Not even born yet and I'm already using the kid for a cheap punchline. Obviously, we'll keep the updates coming, so stay tuned.

Second topic: The First Berkshire District's very own Dan Bosley has, no doubt influenced by the need to get picked on anonymously, begun a blog of his own. A window into the inner workings of state government. Hopefully it will smell better. Anyway, while the name of the thing--"Dan Bosley's Blog"--is not about to win a Pulitzer Prize, it is the content that will capture my interest. He's already started up with a copy of his testimony at a net neutrality hearing in Boston. Dan--welcome to the party. Maybe you can coax Clark out of blog retirement.

This is especially welcome since over the last few months, the local blogging scene has thinned out some: Andy Etman, Da Snoop, and Tom B have closed up shop, and I'm lucky if I can even think of three hundred interesting words a month, let alone write them down. Still, I like it when a new post from one of my blogroll amigos crosses my RSS aggregator, so please keep on posting.

(Margie? Gary? Are you listening?)

Not really a third topic, but a new plan idea: any time a show comes on featuring four nobodies with great big TV-sized heads and blinkered priorities engaged in vigorous debate of the clothes people wore to the Oscars, and you're tempted to watch: make pudding instead. It's a real win-win, more so if you like pudding.

Special Primary Edition

2008-01-26T18:53:00.000-05:00

Nothing like an election to bring out the know-it-alls.

So let's get straight to the handicapping:

The Democrats

Sen. John Edwards (D-Waffle House): ever since the 2004 election cycle, I've not been able to muster up any kind of connection with or respect for the gentleman from NC. He's just...well, he's too slick. He may be smart, he may be sincere, he may even be a true populist, but I could just never trust him underneath the $400 haircut and slippery used-car-salesman smile. His wife is sicker than they're letting on and I can't believe his true focus is going to be adapting to the larger Washington stage he claims to be an outsider to. On the other hand, he's perfectly passable VP material and I'm not even sure he wasn't just running this time to try to grab the 2nd spot again. But he'll hang in past February 5th and hope his delegates will make a difference this summer in Denver. Unfortunately, they won't.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-Carpetbag): The junior senator from New York, by almost all accounts, is a woman of grasping ambition, rivalled only by that of her husband.

Let's talk about the Bill factor for a second. I will be the first guy to say that if ol' William J. were to run again, I would vote for him in a heartbeat. He's a true genius, who if he hadn'ta let his dong lead him around DC, would have left office with veneration status close to that of an assassination victim. It was basically all the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy had on him, if you think about it. But here's my problem: Hillary is not Bill.

I know she saw how to run the country firsthand. Sharing your morning coffee with the President 4 days out of 7 will give you a really good idea on what you can expect in terms of the day-to-day. But she's just not as smart as he is. She's nowhere near as charismatic as he is. There's already a giant segment of the country that just plain LOATHES her and would never vote for her in a general election. Her nomination would so galvanize the right to mobilize for the eventual Republican nominee in key battleground states like Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New Jersey that it would be like losing all the momentum built up from resentment over the war, the economy, and Republican arrogance.

She'll probably win the nomination, because the "establishment" seems to be falling in line behind her. But she's not getting my vote. No, this time around, my Democratic primary vote goes to:

Sen. Barack Obama (D-ivisive). I know. He has neither the insider view of the White House nor the connections built after years of public service. But that may not be such a bad thing--I mean, look what years of baggage-laden Administrations have done to this country. Senator Obama represents a new start, a fresh perspective outside the box, and a new face that simply will not have to work as hard as the other candidates to build consensus or earn respect from people who've initially opposed him.

Imagine what it says to the world about the American people when we elect a non white male with the middle name "Hussein" after 8 years of the current Chief Executive--a vindictive, brittle, jingoistic xenophobe with far too much unfounded confidence in his ability to run a country. "We've realized our mistake and gone the other way," it says. "We ARE tolerant enough to be good world citizens and still show the strength of resolve we need to defeat our enemies." Now, more than ever, that's a message we need to be sending.

Big win in South Carolina aside, Sen. Obama faces an uphill battle at this point; party faithful sentiment is strong for HRC, and I'm pretty sure he'd rather go back to the Senate than over to the Old Executive Office Building for a VP's schedule of attending funerals in Estonia. So as long as Dennis Kucinich is out of the running (NEVER discount the "hobbit who married a hot wife" factor), he'll get my vote. But I'm afraid it's just bad timing for the 46-year-old Senator from Illinois.

The Republicans

Mike Huckabee (R-Walmart): You know, I don't generally think that Senators are good Presidential candidates. There's a big difference being one member of a legislative delegation and actually having RUN something as an executive. Plus, the longer you're around, the more they can twist your voting record around. You remember the emails you got about John Kerry voting against body armor, tanks, and planes? You were supposed to think that he was ready to hand the entire Lousiana Purchase over to Pakistan. I know it's ridiculous. YOU know it's ridiculous. But there are a lot of people who believe--very strongly--in the ridiculous, as a matter of course.

In fact, the last sitting Senators to win a Presidential election were John Kennedy in 1960, Warren Harding in 1920, and Benjamin Harrison in 1888. Not a great track record for the Upper Housers.

But THIS guy? Ugh. Please. This guy is the "Left Behind" candidate. People who look forward to nuclear annihilation in the Middle East to pave the way for Jesus' return to Earth want this guy running the United States. He plays bass in a band and spouts Bryan-style populism and is the only candidate in the race with a vestigial sense of humor, but is just totally the wrong candidate for the electorate at large at this point in history.

Mitt Romney (R-Loathsome Pandering Empty Suitville): No. Friggin. Way. Next:

Sen. John McCain (R-The Nursing Home): The best of who's left. A war hero who was totally jobbed by the Bush machine in 2000. A champion of campaign finance reform. Very electable in a general election, especially running against Hillary Clinton. I suppose this'd be the guy I'd vote for in a primary, but he's too hawky in the Middle East, too socially conservative, and worst, he failed to lash out against the Rove/Cheney machinery that sunk his battleship eight years ago. Took it in the shorts, smiling and gritting his teeth all the way. Very disappointing. But still, he's an honorable guy and you can't really fake that. And he'd certainly be doing a better job than whoever is President NOW.

Rudolph Giuliani (R-What Happened): Oh, man, the opportunity this guy frittered away. What a TERRIBLE candidate he turned out to be. Such awful strategy, ignoring Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and anything resembling early momentum. "I've got an idea," someone must have told him. "Who pays attention during the first four weeks of primary season anyway? So, we'll poll below Stalin in a few states, but once February 5th comes along, we'll win it ALL!" And he believed it, too. Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhh.

His message ("9/11! 9/11! Squaaaaawk! 9/11!") was crafted by morons and is now a punch line. I'm wondering if this whole thing is a blatant attempt to end up as the VP candidate. Still, I'm pretty sure the country won't have Big Rudy to kick around any more. He can just move back to NYC (where he'd live on the corner of 9th St and 11th Ave, which doesn't really exist but would be really funny if it did. Well, not REALLY funny. You know what I mean), collect big speaker money, and wait for the next opportunity to stand atop a smoking pile of rubble with a bullhorn.

So it's shaping up as Clinton vs McCain in November (interestingly called as such by ABC News back in March 2006), which is pretty much a dead heat as of the current poll data.

God help us all.

March of the Meatballs

2007-11-13T18:44:00.000-05:00

Maybe this should have been "November of the Meatballs", but that loses a little bit of critical alliteration.

Yes, never put it past me to use my teeny-weeny virtual soapbox to hump an event near and dear to the heart of pretty much all of us here in the Steeple City: The 2007 Annual North Adams Rotary Club All You Can Eat Spaghetti Supper. It is back upon us, y'all, and it is this coming Thursday night, November 15th, 2007. Head on over to the American Legion (not St. Anthony's, like last year) on American Legion Drive. Bring six bucks for dinner tickets--five if you want to feed a young'un--and a fistful of cashola for the AWESOME Chinese Auction and raffle items we have going on.

We start at 4 and go to 7, and for your hard-earned lucre you get yourself as many plates full of freshly-boiled pasta and HOMEMADE meatballs--that's right, lovingly hand produced by folks who take the time to disdain the bagged, frozen, perfectly spherical meat-lumps that are so frequently bounced steaming onto your charitable event plate--that you can stuff yourself with, along with all-vegetarian lettuce-based salad, and bread, and a soft drink.

This being the Legion, you also have yourself the option of turning on the drinking lamp. Beats church, by a mile.

And the pies, folks, the strawberry pies. This is nine inches worth of fresh strawberries, proprietary 100% red glaze, and cream that has been whipped to within an inch of its life. It's the legendary DiLego family recipe that, like the hot dogs from Jack's, means you have actually tasted North Adams, Massachusetts. These go fast, kids. You can buy a whole pie--about twenty-eight and a quarter inches of bliss, measured circumferentially--for fifteen bucks. Just get in touch with me to pre-order before you miss out. Or, for a measly three bucks you can get a slice right then and there.

We are not responsible for public berrygasms.

And we are of course presenting, for your charitable auction enjoyment, a fabulous selection of local merchandise and gift certificates that really puts the shame screws to the other such events in town. Who's on our table? Let's see: Gift certificates from Molly's Bakery, Jack's Hot Dogs, Village Pizza, Cafe Latino, Red Sauce, Cup and Saucer, and more....merchandise from Carpinello's Service Station, Passion Parties by Tara, Tangiers, Bark 'n Cat, Persnickety Toys, Tropical Gardens, Dragonflii, Cheshire Auctions, and also more. You just have to come and see all this stuff, because there'll be lots more by the time you show up.

Can't stick around for a sit-down? Why, no matter! Get your friends together and give us a call and we'll get yer orders together to go. Get ENOUGH friends and we'll deliver 'em over to you ourselves!

Rub elbows with the local Rotarians, cognoscenti, illuminati, and a shaker or two of parmesan cheese. The proceeds for this will stay mostly here in our community, helping local schools and charitable organizations do their thang: sponsoring our champion Little League team, for instance, or setting up the autism resource library at BFair, or giving a holiday party featuring toys and winter coats for kids who need 'em but may not get 'em otherwise.

So you basically have no excuse. See you Thursday. Come hungry. Don't wear a white shirt or a tie you'd be upset to get sauce on. I'll be in the kitchen wearin my chef whites servin' up the goods, and Tara will be happy to sell you auction and raffle tickets. You can't lose, any way you look at it, can you?

Sox Win!

2007-10-29T00:19:00.000-04:00

How about them Red Sox, huh?

I got a whole post coming up about Boston sportsfandom, one of those topics that easily qualifies for the "Far Too Much Written About By People You Want To Smack" award. I'll see if I can't bring more to the table than your average radio sports call-in show meathead.

But for us long-time observers of the perennial trainwreck that was this baseball team for the ponderous bulk of our existence, this is the good life. Enjoy!

Mongering

2007-10-23T20:51:00.000-04:00

Is warmongering the only type of mongering there is?

Is anybody out there baseballmongering, or surgerymongering, or drycleaningmongering? Or, heavens, windmillmongering?

But back to straight-up warmongering: you have to hand it to society's current crop of mongers. I was left incredulous after reading another little-noticed story about the amazing inability of the Bush Administration to recognize reality, even as reality is biting it in the ass day after day. This month's Esquire is running a feature by John H. Richardson titled "The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn't Want You to Know".

Richardson goes forth to build a story around the frustrations of a number of former Administration staffers--most notably Colin Powell--around Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney ("Bumsfeldney"?) booting a post-9/11 thawing of US-Iran relations, including major Iranian diplomatic and military concessions, in favor of simple-minded moralizing and demonization of Iran as part of a largely imaginary "axis of evil".

Just like in the run-up to the Second Gulf War, intelligence is being ignored and the truth-tellers are being prosecuted. Just like in late '02, they won't talk to the people who are having sabres rattled in their faces because their form of government is not like our form of government--as though the fact that it hasn't been for the approximate 12,000 year history of humanity there fails to register at all. The neoconservative collective mind, it appears, is as made up as it's ever going to be. Iran either immediately becomes a secular pro-American government, or we're going to invade the ever-loving crap out of it.

Were this to actually happen, it would be probably the largest and single most ironic blow to American Democracy since Samuel Tilden felt the greasy sting of electoral idiocy in 1876. The American people were asked what they thought about continuing the war in the Middle East about a year ago, and they responded with a mandate that enough was enough: finish what you have to over there and get gone. The majority says that it's time to hit the Mesopotamian bricks. Yet as surely as the truth keeps interfering with the Administration's simplistic view of geopolitical, military, and economic reality, the majority will be ignored, and democracy will be subverted--even as democracy becomes the symbolic MacGuffin around which this war is being organized.

The reason for the runup to firepower is supposedly the improvised explosive devices manufactured in Iran being used against American soldiers. No doubt that those who manufacture the roadside bombs that take out Americans are our enemies. But you can't always best an enemy by running at him with a broken beer bottle. Sometimes, a better, cheaper, more permanent, and whole-lot-less-bloody option is to make him NOT your enemy.

Besides, even after you've sliced his face open and are standing on his defeated, embittered chest, what chance do you have of going forward peacefully? Ever?

We've already Bumsfeldneymongered that chance away. We can only hope that a few key people in charge of running this country realize that it's not too late to avoid blundering into another war the American people don't want, don't need, and can't afford.

One Post, Five Topics, Twelve Months, And A Meeting

2007-10-08T16:53:00.000-04:00

Earlier today I looked up from whatever it is that my employer is paying me to do and noticed that I've unknowingly stumbled over the one-year anniversary of the birth of this very blog. Happy Berkshire to Sense, retroactive to this last October 4th.

Fifty-three posts published, six posts abandoned. Four hundred twenty-two comments, followed by three hundred fifty-one quizzical expressions after reading said comments. Two dozen times Tara's said "You should blog about that," and twenty-two times I responded by saying, "Eh, get your own blog."

Three times I've been recognized as "the Berkshire Sense guy". Eight thousand unique visitors, about seven blog-related tension headaches, an off-year election, and one 2576-square-foot fixer-upper with a Honda-shaped hole in the porch later, I'm giving myself props for not bailing on you, my eight or ten loyal readers and close family members. Go, me.

So let me take this opportunity to match some of the odd socks in the big old bag of "you should blog about that" I have lying around:

Thanks to Glenn Drohan of the North Adams Transcript for being so desperate for content as to publish my previous post about refinishing our floor in print format. I'm not saying that there are many slow news days up here, but I used to read the New York Daily News pretty regularly and I don't recall that many stories about Joey Bagodonuts from Astoria installing a low-flow shower head in his guest bathroom. I suppose that's the price you pay for not getting to write about the latest set of indicted officials.

Speaking of officials, several months ago I was appointed an alternate member of the City's Zoning Board of Appeals. This has been a great introduction to public service as well as a fascinating study of minutiae tucked within the City Zoning Ordinance. Did you know, for instance, that if you want to keep chickens in North Adams, your lot needs to be at least two acres? In case you had ever wondered, this is probably why you see so few chickens wandering around town.

And speaking of service, Tara and I were tapped on the shoulder and asked if we could help host the Drinking Liberally chapter meetings here in North Adams. So, we're calling the next meeting, which is this coming Thursday, 10/11, at 6pm, at Cafe Latino in the MassMOCA complex, and each 2nd Thursday of the month thereafter. Why should you come? Three words: four-dollar margaritas. That, and lively political discussion among friendly voters and other noters, ranging from the slightly hippie to the outright dippie. All are welcome, provided you're 21 and have an opinion. No cover charge. Argumentative righties welcome, but please leave your Dick Cheney model shotgun in the car; cheap shots or tequila shots only, please.

Speaking of politics, there's an election going on, isn't there? I'd like to invite any candidate to come down to Latino on Thursday to stump. There should be low turnout for this election coming up, so a few influential handshakes and campaign platform summaries may just put a bubble candidate over the top here. So someone tell Lisa Blackmer or Howard D'Amico that they should show up and tell a dozen or twenty registered voters why we should vote for them. And that goes fer the rest of ya, as well.

So I look forward to a new year of doing whatever it is that I'm doing here. I want to thank my family and friends, and especially the small but feisty Berkshire County blogging community, for all your acceptance and support. If it weren't for you, I would just be another lone bloviating know-it-all with his own blog. Instead, I am one of several bloviating know-it-alls with my own blog. Fine company to be in as we head towards the beginning of another successful and happy year.

Hitting the Floor

2007-10-01T23:57:00.000-04:00

We first walked through what is now our house early one sunny afternoon in November 2005. Tara stopped in the doorway between the dining room and kitchen, and making sure that the real estate agent's eyes were cast elsewhere, turned to me and mouthed the words "I love it".

I looked down at the dining room floor beneath my feet, sighed, and said, "Well, first thing we have to do is refinish these floors."

There was nice hardwood under there somewhere, beneath the stains, scratches, wear, tear, and indelibly burned image of a rug that had probably not been moved in the 45 years since the house had last been on the market.

As a picture is worth a kilobyte of text, here is some insight into what I was feeling that bright November day:

My "first thing" prediction turned out to be about 17 months shy of the truth, and only this midsummer did we complete the cascade of major and minor projects we needed to do before we could turn our attention back down to the dining room hardwood. Tara, ever the adventurous spirit, was immediately up for doing it ourselves. I, ever the spirit prone to end up in the emergency room after running myself over with a drum sander, decided to see how much it would cost to have a pro do it.

All I needed was someone to sand, stain, and finish 195 square feet of wood that we've been told with varying degrees of authority is either fir, southern yellow pine, or red oak. A few hundred bucks, right? Ha ha ha--nope. $1100, came the low estimate, so Tara and I won the contract.

Yeah, not knowing what you're doing is always scary. But whenever that's the case, the first and best move to make is not to be too precious about your expected results. It's easier to change your standards than your qualifications, anyway. Our design philosophy, then, became not to try to make those 125 year-old floors look like 125 day-old floors. A little bit of a distressed look would fit better with the projected turn-of-the-century design of the room. Mentally, we were ready.

So, the day of reckoning reckoned, and we moseyed on down to Carr Hardware and rented what us non-pros call a U-Sand machine. It's a four-pad random orbital sander, guaranteed impossible to destroy your floors with. That's it in the picture up there. Several advantages to the design, including an efficient vacuum and bag to minimize dust, and a sanding surface that extends right to the edge of the unit. You can't gouge or put swirly marks into the wood, you don't need a separate edger, and you aren't coughing up fine wood particles for the next full month.

Appearances do not tell the full story of how much this beast physically WEIGHS. I nearly herniated three or four disks, two ligaments, and a carpal tunnel or two just getting the damn thing into and out of the car.

So once we plugged the thing in and started sanding with both hands, we realized that the design that makes it impossible to wreck your floors also makes the actual sanding process last the best part of a day. The thing is TERRIBLE at removing old finish: the 36-grit sandpaper that comes with it gums up after only a few minutes, and if you don't catch it in time, sets up a lovely tar-like residue on the floor that you need to scrape off with a putty knife and one or more toxic chemicals.

Eventually we finished up with--that is to say, ran out of--both daylight and low-grit sandpaper, and we moved on to the less aggressive grits. Yes, I'm too lazy to think of a good breakfast joke around that line.

Eight or so hours later, the sanding was done, and the next day, after some lovely hands-and-knees-based dust removal, we started the staining process.

Tara chose an oil-based stain that looked like liquid tobacco and smelled like brain damage. We put in on thick because we liked the darker effect of it, and another round of hands-and-kneesing with a rag and a can of mineral spirits gave us the hand-rubbed distressed finish we were after. Fine work, but we were almost overcome by vapors and had to spend the next night in Tara's parents guest room.

Two and a half days later, once the stain had dried and the headaches abated, we went over it with four coats of water-based polyurethane finish. I loved this stuff so much I wanted to dump Tara for it. Almost no odor, easy to apply, dried quickly, and cleaned up easily. Of course, before coats two and three, there was more crawling around with a sanding pad and tack cloth. I hadn't gotten that close to a floor since margarita night my freshman year in college, but finally, voilà, we had finally completed the job:

Yeah, we couldn't get the rug mark completely out since the stain took deeper into that wood, but frankly the whole thing looks a zillion times better than when we started, and the entire project--sander rental, sandpaper, stain, finish, Advil, and various tools--ran us around two hundred dollars. We got what we wanted from our floor, saved $900, and can now bore people silly with our knowledge and experience of floor finishing procedures. All in all, we're fairly proud of ourselves.

And we still have no idea what type of wood this is. Any guesses?

The Casinowealth of Massachusetts

2007-09-20T01:12:00.000-04:00

Ah, yes. The fantasy of sticking 75 cents into a 36-inch high aluminum and glass box and walking away with enough money to never have to work again.

The fun of getting plied with free liquor by a redhead in a short dress while winning a few thousand dollars playing blackjack at a table full of laughing, happy people on a Saturday night.

New shops. Restaurants. Tourists. Surging state revenues. Lower property tax bills. Hundreds of good head-of-household jobs in construction, hospitality management, casino operations, washroom attending. Well, not so much the last one, but you get my point. This is the promise of casino resorts opening here in the Commonwealth.

But you are unlikely to see it happen in Massachusetts. Too many people--our own State Rep Dan Bosley foremost among them--are against it.

This is hardly the first time Rep. Bosley has stated his position on the issue. It comes as no surprise. But I disagree with the way Dan states his case against casino gambling: quoting studies and the like, as though this were some sort of debate team exercise, and alleging that this type of research is somehow canonical in its predictive value that casinos become sociological disasters. Or that any group anywhere couldn't fund up a study that supposedly uses the scientific method to fortify their position.

The dark spectres loom large and scary. Gambling addiction. Crime. Corruption. Greedy casino operators keeping all the money for themselves. Good ol' boys in smoke-filled rooms doling out contracts to their robber baron buddies. The giant sucking sound of money leaving the pockets of people who can least afford to lose it. The tremendous social and economic cost of casinos far outweigh their benefits, we're told. The glittering facade has a sticky black dark side, says our legislative delegation, a sentiment echoed by a tidal wave of values voters. Think about that odd conglomeration of nanny-staters and Bible-thumpers brought together as one.

But let's talk about the truth, if there can even be such a thing when attempting to predict the future. Truth usually lies somewhere in between ideological poles, an indeterminate distance from two opposing camps trying to shout each other down selling contradictory bills of goods.

I'm not going to claim I know what's going to happen if they stick a casino in New Ashford, Chicopee, Charlemont, or in the Clark Biscuit building on Ashland Street. Nobody does. THAT'S the truth, folks.

I'm not saying that it might not end up being something totally regrettable--but one thing I don't see are casinos closing once they open. The market speaks pretty loudly about this, and consumer choice is--or should be, I think--a legitimate political driving force.

There are legitimate concerns on the opposition side. Nobody's on record as wanting more crime, corruption, or poverty, and it's no stretch to see how a casino would encourage those sorts of societal ills. But say you put it about a mile off a main road down a long driveway, so people have to drive to get there, but so that they have to drive THROUGH somewhere to get to it. Do that, and you're eliminating loitering around existing business, providing a secure perimeter to minimize personal and automobile related crimes, and driving traffic at least past local attractions. This is Foxwoods' and Mohegan Sun's problem: make people drive interstate to back road to casino, and you're pretty much FORCING people to only go gambling. Look, casinos--like any destinations--are part of a complete tourism and hospitality strategy. Before New Orleans was decimated two years ago, Tara and I used to go to the Harrah's on Canal Street, but it's not like we stopped eating beignets at Cafe Du Monde. It's not the solution in and of itself, but it's closer to the solution than doing nothing, or funding yet another study.

If you're writing casino legislation from scratch, as we would be here, cut the state and local cops and courts in on a guaranteed, audited portion of revenue. Set up a Nevada-style Gaming Commission with some serious teeth. You've now created four or five dozen legitimate government jobs directly funded by the gambling people are doing anyway, and you're funding the law enforcement that we hear will be needed for the incipient crime wave that accompanies legalized gambling.

And one more thing: relax on the moralizing. Please. The Commonwealth already makes money from gambling, liquor, and tobacco. Look: people smoke, drink, and bet on stuff. It looks really silly to be collecting money with one hand and wagging a finger with the other. Sure, as a society you may not want to encourage that behavior, but it's already state-sanctioned. Didn't I see a Lottery commercial the other day?

Ironically, if they built a casino near here, I wouldn't go too much, myself. I'm too cheap and know finite mathematics too well to enjoy gambling much. But that doesn't mean I can't recognize that giving some people what they want isn't always a bad thing for everybody else.

Too bad we won't get the chance to see.

Chapter 2

2007-08-29T15:59:00.000-04:00

Continued from the immediately previous post. I post this knowing full well that Greg has threatened to kick my ass if I wrote any more about Jennifer Love Hewitt. Well, great literature requires taking risks, and although that's probably not too applicable here, I will provide the stepstool he will require in order to attempt said ass-kicking. Hey, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Anyway, enjoy.

       *           *           *

The battle had gone on for decades and taken out all in its path. The cities had been destroyed for years already. There were children now who would never know what it was like to have a Burger King, a 24-Hour Mobil Station with a Dunkin' Donuts in it, a doublewide discount cigarette trailer, and a combination Pizza Hut/KFC/Taco Bell all right next to each other off the interstate. There weren't any more interstates.

       *           *           *

Meanwhile, the air inside the camoflaged tents on the top of the ridgeline was thick with sweat, drama, and estrogen. The outgunned, yet resourceful band of women's pro tennis players had held the valley for going on three months, keeping the semi-hot celebrities from getting to the river beyond. There had been casualties, of course, but their supply line was holding, and reinforcements had arrived. Morale on the lines was good; it always was when the patrols came back with the occasional severed head or pair of really fabulous pumps. But Martina Hingis had reason to worry. The gritty racketeueses were still just one serious uphill charge away from being overrun by the "pops"--short for Pop Tarts--and their artificially firm fannies and Hollywood tramp stamps. Only they stood between them and everything Supreme Leader Monica Seles had built over the last long and bloody year. Besides, they knew that no prisoners would be coming down from that hill. They were staying put--one way, or the other.

"Call up Davenport, tell her to grab Pierce and Dokic, and suit up for recon," she told Serena Williams. "We need to fuck with those bitches a little bit."

       *           *           *

The word "postapocalyptic" can mean a lot of things. It can refer to a subgenus of fungi indigenous to the Central Amazon Basin, or the flow turbulence caused by the vibration of the impellor assembly of a jet engine, or it can describe the way things look after one or more apocalypses. In this case, though, it goes way beyond that.

It started innocently enough. Nobody in the Before Time would have banked on society's annihilation coming from a simple feature on SportsCenter, designed to eat up two minutes of TV time in between basketball highlights and beer commercials. Two junior producers thought that having Anna Kournikova and Reese Witherspoon play some skee-ball would be worth a few yuks. And it was--right up until Witherspoon lay dead in a pool of her own blood, a skee-ball jammed down her larynx. From that point on, it was war.

ESPN was, as most probably could have guessed, first up against the wall. As nobody was able to adequately provide coverage of the first skirmishes, all the celebrity magazines and on-line sports betting web sites went tits-up. Their parent media conglomerates and publishing houses turned inside out and collapsed, followed closely by the demise of the consumer electronics industry. The financial, manufacturing and hospitality sectors all crashed and burned soon after on the same fateful April afternoon. Within two weeks of that, government employees just stopped showing up for work, and by Memorial Day, all that was left of the world economy was Nigerian spam emails. Everyone left alive just scavenged for enough scraps to make it through the long, cold nights.

What Has He Been Doing?

2007-08-23T22:17:00.000-04:00

Back when I started doing this, I told myself that I wouldn't blog about blogging. With blogging, as with most things, nobody cares about the process, just the product. It's just human nature to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. And speaking as both a blogger and a blogging reader. it's less than thrilling reading about bloggers blogging about blogging.

I am, of course, violating that principle right now. Eh, what the hell. I figure there's no need getting all high and mighty with myself.

Back when I started doing this, I wanted to write longer posts, too. Partially to train myself to write column-length stuff in case someone may one day want to underpay me for prose; partially to avoid horning in on the act that the bloggers I read were pulling off. Still, I'm not sure I'm going to stick to my guns on that one. Maybe a few quick paragraphs from time to time helps keep the neurons from getting too sticky.

Also back when I started doing this, I was under the impression that there were fewer people without a shred of a sense of humor. Really. I like to try to keep this light. I'm not here to get on anyone's case. I'm not usually pushing an agenda, apart from simple straight-up good government stuff. Most of my posts have dealt with desserts and countertops and Star Trek. I'm not a rabidly opinionated type of guy.

But it makes blogging a whole lot less fun when I have to get all defensive every time I make public some trivial detail of my experience. It has never made any sense to me to pursue the politics of personal destruction that have so pathologically perfused the populace over the last decade. Sure, other folks opinions may be uninformed, factually incorrect, or just flat-out stupid, but nothing to me has ever been truer than the somewhat politically incorrect maxim that arguing over the internet is like running in the Special Olympics--even if you win, you're still retarded.

I like a good discussion as much as the next guy, but I get tired of being called names, having my positions misrepresented, and basically taking a big bite of shit sandwich when all I'm trying to do is keep writing. I'm going to have to move to fiction. Actually, I have a short story started, and I'll end the post with the first couple paragraphs. If anybody wants to read more, I'll post the rest of it:

Jennifer Love Hewitt reshouldered the dusty AK-47 she had ripped out of the hands of a dead Soviet paratrooper back in Angola in 1986, spit a Skoal Bandit into the sandy ground, and peered past the chalky cliffs into the blinding sun.

"Fuckin' pricks," she muttered to Kelly Clarkson, who was standing two paces behind her. "You can tell they're just going back to the old playbook. Flank us around that ridgeline and pin us down while they run back to the high ground. That's just how fuckin' Hilary Duff got her tits blown off." Sweat dripped into her cleavage as she defiantly spit, "Not this time, you douchebags. Not this time," to the enemy hidden in the surrounding hills.

Clarkson understood, too. She understood Jennifer Love Hewitt in only the way that semi-hot, family friendly young female celebrities and lesbian lovers turned elite strike force commandos can understand each other.

So let me know. I'll probably start posting more regularly now that summer is winding down, but I'm not going to be picking any fights with anybody for a bit. You'll just have to deal with mundane--yet witty and impeccably punctuated--comments on stuff like what TV shows we're watching and our latest charity event. Go ahead, see how big and smart you sound picking on me about being a Rotarian, tough guy.

Ho, Ho, Huh?

2007-07-14T20:20:00.000-04:00

So on Saturday I did another one of these random things that we all do from time to time: I threw out the first pitch at a North Adams Steeplecats game dressed as Santa Claus, but with a Hawaiian shirt, sandals, and shades.

Let the record show that Santa threw a strike.

It was Transcript day at the 'Cats game and publisher Bob Chapman went with a "Christmas in July" theme to bring in some toys and generally remind folks about the paper's yearly Santa Fund drive. His original Santa had to cancel, so I was tapped on the shoulder and asked if I'd step in. I figure this is because most of the best Santas are 6'4". And the real exceptional ones actually celebrate Hanukkah. Brings a nonjaundiced eye to the role, I'd say.

So I ho-ho-ho'ed around with Slider the mascot for a half an hour before the game, amazed at how often a woman in a tiger suit gets asked for her autograph. Then right after the lineups were announced I shook my bowlful of jelly onto the field and shaved the outside corner with a two-seam split-fingered fastball. More waving, some handshakes, a few innings in the stands (disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reported for a minor metropolitan blog), then off to the Hot Dog Ranch for some dinner. If you like hot wings, they have some pretty good ones. Just a tip.

If I run across any pictures of this, you'll see them here (the Santa stuff, not the wings. I assume you all know what chicken wings look like).

[UPDATE: Pics by Nick Mantello and/or Holly Pelczynski found at the Steeplecats web site, here and here. These better get re-run come this December.]

The other interesting thing that happened: in the Joe Wolfe parking lot on the way in, I was asked to sign a set of nomination papers by Mr. Stephen Andrews, proprietor of the Wigwam up on the Western Summit, who is trying to throw his hat in the ring and become the next mayor of North Adams.

"Really?" I inquired, wishing I could raise one eyebrow as well as my lovely wife.

He really was. And in response to the "Why are you running" question, apparently Mr. Andrews has or had been in a purchasing capacity with the federal government for some number of years and--I don't have an exact quote but this is close--"you can't really compare prices from just one vendor." This was, for better or worse, his own summary of his campaign platform.

Now I'm no politician, but in case the day comes I ever seek public office, my strategy isn't going to be to run as "the other guy" to "give the voters a choice". Our incumbent mayor has been around for a long time, and you don't displace that kind of mojo by being just another name on the ballot. That's pretty much how John Kerry lost in 2004.

Still, someone has the cojones to give it a shot, which is impressive in itself. We'll see if he gets his signatures.

Seeing as how it was Transcript day at the game, are we going to read about this in today's paper? Stay tuned, sports fans!

The Wild Irish West

2007-07-12T18:10:00.000-04:00

We're back from a few days in the West of Ireland. An awesome country to visit, unless you don't like green. If you have a problem with green, man, you'd be in the wrong country. You would HATE it there.

And it's probably not a good idea to walk around streetcorners and stand outside pub bathrooms muttering "Always after me Lucky Charms." I don't think the locals appreciate it.

This our first return trip to Ireland since we got married there five (blissful) Januaries ago, in Monaghan. This time we put about 600 kilometers on a blue right-hand-drive Ford Focus throughout the middle West, venturing through Mayo, Clare, Galway, and Limerick. We picked up a pair of Belgian hitchhikers in the Connemara on the way up to Cong. I bought a bodhrán in Spiddal and drank shots of Jameson in the bar at the Galway Bay Hotel. I learned how to pronounce taoiseach, ghaeltacht, and bodhrán, for that matter. Slept a lot, ate too much, and almost got into only one pub fight, with a couple of crabby sisters from New York.

More interesting details: gas costs on average $6.10 a gallon. A crazy lady tried to run out of the plane onto the tarmac at JFK. Some of the Irish "national" roads make Rensselaer County Road 5A look like a four-lane superhighway. There's a ton of new houses, with a lot more pink sandstone than you'd think would make sense. And of course, you got your livestock:

You gonna eat that grass?
We actually did get into one of those sheep-causing-a-traffic-jam situations, but only for a few seconds. A very picture postcard moment.

We spent quality time with Tara's folks and two local radio personalities who accompanied us for the bulk of the trip. Tara's folks would go off to check out cliffs and castles, while we found cute little towns to poke around...like Westport:

Always after me Lucky Ch...dammit, sorry
...and Ennis:

Sure'n you'll be wantin some winkles and dillisk, then?

Always after me lucky pork chops...
...and the aforementioned Spiddal:

Don't be scared, Seamus, they're leaving soon
So a wonderful time was had by all, and really there's no better place to spend a vacation: the weather is mild, the people are friendly, the food's a lot better than in Scotland, and most of the people there speak something like English. So as they say there, céad míle fáilte, which is pronounced "centrifuge" and means "winkles and dillisk for everyone".

Some Stories Just Write Themselves

2007-06-13T10:12:00.000-04:00

First off, thanks to all of you who've encouraged me to stop being such a pantywaist about the blogging. After thinking about it a lot, I've concluded that I've wildly overthought the whole thing. Too much fretting about the format and the like. As any Stallone movie goes to show you, they don't all have to be Oscar winners.

Second off, it's a walk in the park when you have good material. To that end, I would like to thank the woman who drove her car into my house yesterday.

No kidding.

Yesterday afternoon a little after 5:00, I was in the kitchen pouring myself a cup of coffee when I heard a similar sound to the one you hear when a ton or so of snow slides off the roof. Kind of a whoomp-THUD. Or maybe a shhhhhp-BOOM. Regardless, given the June timeframe, I was pretty sure there was no snow involved.

So I poked my head outside and saw this red Accord sedan sitting in the street at a weird angle. The front right tire's blown and resting against the curbstone. Both airbags had deployed. It began to look as though my afternoon snack would have to wait, so I made it down the stairs and looked into the car.

The 60-ish woman behind the wheel was unconscious, having a seizure and generally having a really bad afternoon. [UPDATE: The Transcript is reporting a correction; apparently what I was saw was an 'unknown medical condition', and not a seizure.] I caught a glimpse of a child seat in the back. My stomach lurched, but I did not see any evidence of an occupant. A good sized patch of my front lawn was scattered over a few hundred square feet and there was an Accord-sized hole in my front porch. A passerby notified 911, my next door neighbors came out to help, and EMS arrived in a couple minutes.

Now, it seems that lights and sirens are an invitation to some kind of gruesome block party. The entire rest of the neighborhood turned out within minutes to catch a glimpse of a severed limb, or somebody resisting arrest, or who knows what. But soon I had a big enough crowd standing around that I was mulling over mixing up a batch of lemonade and grilling some steak tips. I'd have made a fortune.

As it was, I was pretty embarrassed over not having mowed my lawn for a while. It was like my front yard was wearing dirty underwear when it had an accident.

I grabbed my camera to take some pictures. I got up to the hole in the porch and a firefighter started yelling at me to get away from there.

"My house!" I said, less than eloquently, then proceeded to slip and fall down the hill. Perhaps that's what the multitudes had assembled to see. I gave myself a 9.375, as I didn't quite stick the landing the way I normally like to.

Forensically, it looks like the car must have come screaming north up Wall Street (the street with the cones in the 2nd picture). No skid marks on the road, so she probably charged straight up my hill, into my porch, stalled, then rolled back down, turning 45 degrees counterclockwise and ending up against the curb. Notice no dirt tracks on the way UP to the hole, but there's a trail following the front tires down the hill. It really could have been a lot worse--a few feet to the left and she takes out two of our cars in the driveway at full speed. Or a bad bounce leaves her upside-down at the end of our driveway.

Thanks to the story in the paper, we know who the driver is now. As of this writing, she's still in the CCU. Tara's dropping her a card and flowers this afternoon. She really does have our best wishes for a speedy recovery.

So now it starts. There's some structural damage to the porch, the lawn is all torn up, and now we begin to work with the insurance industry to see who's going to sue whom first. Obviously I'll keep everybody updated.

Here's the link to the story in the North Adams Transcript. This kind of celebrity I do not need.

Still, it's nice to be back.

I Have Lost My Voice

2007-05-19T16:23:00.001-04:00

...and can't seem to find it again.

Ben Downing's First 100 Days

2007-04-13T02:43:00.001-04:00

Ben Downing's a pretty busy guy these days.

Ignoring the turkey sandwich next to him, he pulls out his Blackberry and goes over the schedule for Thursday, his 100th day as a Senator in General Court.

"Let's see. I'll be driving in that morning. I have a 9am meeting with the Newgrange Group, folks I've hired to help out with campaign stuff. We have an informal session on Thursday, which means probably nothing going on other than legislation that passed last year that they're trying to get back into the hopper...late files, bills that were filed after the filing deadline that need the approval of rules and such. I have a staff meeting that I have every day I'm down there at 11:45 until 12:45. I have a meeting, with Representative Guyer, at the Attorney General's office in the Consumer Division to talk about some issues we have over in Hancock, with Verizon not investing in their infrastructure. They have old coaxial cables wrapped in paper, so when it rains they lose service over there. I'm meeting with the folks from Comcast to talk telecom issues; I'm sure they'll talk about the telecom tax. We'll probably also talk about broadband out here. And talk about funny things that come up: Cal Ripken, Jr is coming to the State Senate."

I kind of laugh. That is pretty random.

"Yeah, who would've guessed? He'll talk about the Cal Ripken Sr foundation, and promote Badges for Baseball and Healthy Choices, Healthy Children, with the Boys and Girls Clubs of Massachusetts. And then since it's a Thursday, I've got class."

On top of the Pittsfield-Boston roundtrips, keeping in touch with the 48 cities and towns in his district, and the day-to-day business of legislating, Ben's also the cool kid in his public policy Master's classes at Tufts. "I bet you field just as many questions as the professors," I remarked.

His turn to laugh. "Just about. I really do."

I met with the Senator at the Cup and Saucer in North Adams, where he had just come from what must have been a rousing meeting of the local legislative delegation with representatives from the paper manufacturing industry and State Secretary-designate of Labor and Workforce Development Suzanne Bump. It's that kind of stuff that gets him going.

In the last few weeks, Ben's been involved with issues from all over the public policy map: early-stage funding for local biomass/biodiesel production. Commissioning a study of the recruitment and retention of college graduates within the state. Expanding designation rules at the DHCD to help cities and towns keep tabs on absentee landlords. Stamping out paper-wrapped coaxial cables. Posing for pictures with Hall of Fame shortstops.

All this, plus the always nutcracking annual budget process, and a leadership turnover, in the first three months or so of a setting up the first Democratic administration in 12 years. It really fills up his dance card.

But he lights up when he talks about it. It's obvious you're looking at a guy who digs his job.

Ben is, at 25, the youngest member not only of the Senate, but of the entire state legislature. And he knows his election in 2006 wasn't easy. He's got something to prove. "I go into the building with people saying, all right, the kid's got to be able to campaign, at least, but does he know policy? And how hard is he going to work? And that's one thing that I know I have to prove, and I've been out there trying to prove the whole time."

He still catches up on the blogs, though. Enough to zing me about the lack of content for three weeks after the 500-word real life poop joke I posted in March. I reminded him of the blog he sported for a while during the primary, and asked him what happened to it. "Sheer campaign tactics," he joked. "We decided that Marge was the 'blogging candidate' and that she had cornered that market." Sounds like it might be a while before we see a blog--or MySpace page--from him soon.

It's probably easier to just sit where you are and he'll come to you eventually. "The immediate outreach work that we've done has been community forums and community events throughout the district. We did one in Southern Berkshire with Representative Pignatelli. We did one in the hill towns with Representative Kulik in Williamsburg. We've got another one scheduled this coming Sunday in Representative Guyer's hill towns in Windsor to address issues, and we've got one scheduled April 20th with Representative Bosley at MCLA. So there's been outreach. I know I haven't utilized my web site enough yet; we're just trying to figure out the best way to do it."

He's putting a lot of miles on his car, trying to remember a whole bunch of names, and ignoring a lot of turkey sandwiches. But it doesn't sound like he'd have it any other way.

"I absolutely love what I do, every day," he says. "And I mean that in the fullest sense of it. I love the phone calls about Social Security, and I love trying to find a way to address broadband. The full gamut of it interests me. And at this point, I feel blessed to even be able to say that. What does the future hold? I don't know. Maybe you should stay tuned and see if you'll read about it on my blog."

Wherein My Wife Goads Me Into Posting Again

2007-04-08T00:37:00.000-04:00

There is much quality blogsmanship up here in the Northern Berkshires. At least a dozen regular bloggers, a rabidly opinionated readership, the attention of the local legislative delegation. Not a bad deal. We're certainly beating the blogging snot out of whatever's going on down in Pittsfield.

Take a good look at the blogrolls and Technorati listings and you'll see that a scary majority of the Berkshire blogs come from right here in the mighty Hoosic River valley. Our cousins from the banks of the assumedly less mighty Housatonic seem somewhat less willing to commit their thoughts to digital posterity. I wonder what forces are at work there. Has to be a logical explanation.

The mighty Hoosic serves as the introduction to the topic covered by the rest of this post. Our river has its origin in Cheshire Lake, the shores of which comprise the commercial epicenter of the town of Cheshire, Massachusetts. For a few months earlier this year, this town of around 3,400 had a grand total of zero operating restaurants. This changed earlier this year when a new place quietly opened up on Route 8 where Bea's Daily Buzz used to be, and now as of last Sunday, Cheshire's restaurant population has doubled.

The Bass Water Grill has hung out an "Open" sign in the premises formerly occupied by the Lakeside Restaurant, right there on the side of the lake. Run by Ed Bassi, owner of Steeples Restaurant at the North Adams Holiday Inn, the place features a full liquor license and bar, banquet and function facilities, and a newly renovated interior. Having seen that "Open" sign, me, Tara, her little sister (anybody catch the feature in the Advocate about those two a couple issues ago?), and Tara's folks decided to swing on in and give the place a try on its first Saturday night.

Bar area seems pleasant. Only one TV, which is the perfect amount of TVs for a restaurant bar to have. Pleasantly surprised to see our friend Tim, formerly of EGL, practicing mixology and reserving judgment on my penchant for ordering from the less macho side of the drink menu. Dining room seats about 100; has little LCD TVs in the booths along the walls. Not my favorite development in restaurant ambiance, but I suppose you can always turn the things off. On the other hand, the lack of annoying faux antiques on the walls, the non-presence of any background music, and the cool old confessional booth they use to store the ice machine are noticeable nice touches.

The menu is straight-up, no-gimmicks American comparable to, say, Patrick's Pub in Pittsfield. You got about a half-dozen or so selections in the apps, salads, sandwiches, pasta, chicken, steak, or seafood sections. Sandwiches, apps, and salads are in the $6-9 range; entrees go up to around $16 for the sirloin steak. There are probably desserts, but we never got to them. Turns out we overordered apps and most of us petered out during entrees. Not that bad a strategy, as it was worth trying them out: the wings were very impressive, and there was much praise for the pan-fried dumplings. The entrees passed muster as well, although with less universal acclaim.

Waitstaff was very attentive and helpful. We're a strange bunch in restaurants and tend to ask a lot of questions and go off-menu when ordering, and even though this was everybody's first week on the job, our service was top-notch.

If Ed's taking suggestions, I've got some:

Open for a regular Sunday brunch.

Bring in live music when your function room isn't booked on a Friday/Saturday night. It's a good location, the room is a good size, and you're clear of residential neighborhood whingers.

Get rid of the "charging for refills" policy on soda and coffee.

More cheese on the nachos.

Expand the lakeside windows. That view is key, especially facing west towards the lake and the hills. Expensive, perhaps, but makes a huge difference in the dining experience.

Still, the consensus was largely positive, and it's always great to have another option north of Pittsfield. Give them a try, and let the rest of us know what your experience was like.

My Downstairs Plumbing, Vol II: The Plop Thickens

2007-03-19T18:34:00.000-04:00

It gets better.

The rest of the plumbing in the house must have been watching me during the last episode and got the idea that I was responsible for the murder of the drainpipe and toilet flange. It took revenge on me the only way it knew how. In an incredible and disgustingly literal way last Saturday afternoon, my house took a giant shit on me.

Let's back up a bit before we get to that part: after my last post I did some poking around, and a bunch of signs (and a comment by Da Snoop) pointed to a clog between the main standpipe and the city sewer connection as the root cause of my plumbing woes. A local plumber concurred, and suggested the City of North Adams' Water and Sewer Department keeps a cape and set of tights in the back room to swoop in and save the day in cases like this. Eager to fulfill that mental picture, I called downtown and explained the problem. Shortly therafter, three guys from the city came out to snake my sewer connection. None of them were wearing tights.

We traipsed around the cellar looking for the main sewer pipe cleanout, which we never found. Our guess: it's buried somewhere within 3 feet of the foundation wall, 12 to 16 inches under the southwest corner of the basement. None of the branch lines will work to get them in. There's nothing they can do. They left the house, tried snaking out the sewer pipe from the manhole to the property line, and told me to call them back when I find someplace they can stick their auger into.

I had a few ideas, believe me. But now I was back to square one. At a loss, I cast my eye on the crappy old washing machine that was in the basement when we bought the place, but have never and wouldn't ever use.

In a good swift kick to the nuts of the plumbing code, the previous owner had put the drain hose from the washer straight into a 1.25" inch hole drilled into the side of a 4" vertical cast iron pipe. It was an illegally vented drainpipe branch, poking straight outside somewhere underneath our porch. Wonderful. But a light went on in my head: I would simply take the drain hose out of the standpipe, get my auger in through the hole, and snake out the damn thing myself.

Brimming with unfounded confidence, I secured a 50' auger and some pipe repair materials, stood steadfast by the old crappy washer, and pulled the drain hose out of the hole. It dripped some foul stenchy water, then began oozing out a plug of nauseating semi-solid grayish-brown slime. Imagine a turtle, poking its head out of its shell--only instead of a face coming out, it's actually a glop of the vilest substance known to mankind.

I did what I had to do and used the auger to get in the hole. I felt something give. And then it came.

Out of this three-centimeter hole came an explosion of waste material the likes I hope to never see again. For about 15 full seconds, my house bent over and shot projectile diarrhea an arm's length from my face, in an eight foot long stream, from the depths of its bowels onto my basement floor. About 10 seconds in, I was worried it would never end. I was trying to figure out how I was going to explain a house full to the rafters with poo to an insurance adjuster.

Fortunately, it slowed, and eventually stopped. I stood stunned in a quagmire of confusion and raw sewage. My own house had taken a giant crap on me. What the hell had I done to deserve THAT?

I straightened up and recovered my senses, several of which I would have liked to immediately lose again. It's not like I was covered in the stuff or anything, but the shoes I had on are getting buried in the tomato patch once the snow melts. I hope to never touch them with ungloved hand again.

I called in a hazmat team to take care of the aftermath, and Tara's probably never going to set foot in the cellar again. But it did take care of the slow drain situation. The bathtub is psyched about that, at least. Repairs and remediations are set to take place while we set up to do the final plumbing for the kitchen sink and dishwasher. It'll be just like a real house, sooner than later.

Until then, I believe my house and I have reached an uneasy truce. Let's see how it holds.

Ah, Downstairs Bathroom Plumbing,We Hardly Knew Ye

2007-03-14T01:27:00.000-04:00

About a month ago, the plumbing in my downstairs bathroom came to life. It acquired full sentience. Became a conscious being. It was a miracle.

Here's the interesting part, though: having achieved its goal of being the first bathroom plumbing system to experience a sense of self--to reach beyond mere copper, brass, wiped lead, and porcelain to take a sniff of the unexplored realms of consciousness--its very first act was to commit suicide.

The signs were ominous and the portents veritably dripping with looming tragedy, kinda like the part in Flowers For Algernon when the mouse starts acting all about-to-be-deady.

One day last month, apparently right after my bathroom plumbing came to life, I noticed the drain in the bathroom sink was a little slow. So, as any unsuspecting accomplice would have done, I decided to remove the S-trap underneath it and clean out any potential cloggage therein. I mean, there's a lot of hair going on in this house. Still, fair enough, easy enough; mission accomplished.

But my glow of plumbing confidence was matched only by the stench of impending death from the chromed brass drainpipe, which decided while I was reattaching the trap to take some quality time and simply disintegrate. It just (intentionally, I swear) turned into about 400 smallish pieces of jagged chromed brass flakes right in my fingers, leaving a great big empty space where something to keep sink water from getting all over my bathroom should have been.

A quick run (actually, more of a hurried trudge) to Aubuchon Hardware produced a Fernco coupling--a little rubber sleeve with hose clamps on either side of it--and a new piece of drainpipe. I hooked this all up with the meager earthly remains of the previous drainpipe. To my surprise, this textbook jury rig has held water for a couple of weeks. I thought I had saved my sink.

But instead, it seemed that my sink had actually become a zombie, creeping the streets at night moaning "Braiiiiiinnnnss" and terrorizing the other bathrooms in the neighborhood until sunrise.

Then just today, the toilet flatlined. Or at least went into what the cardiologists call crapicardia: not getting rid of all the...well, we'll call it the Republican Party platform...after a flush.

So given my liberal arts education, software development background, and passing knowledge of quantum entanglement, I made an educated decision and pulled out the plunger. A few plunges later and the toilet was flowing like the rain in Seattle. Yes, it was quiet.

Too quiet.

Then I heard a rhythmic thoomp-thoomp-thoomp sound from the basement below. It sounded a bit like blood dripping from the severed head of a teenager who figured that splitting up to look for the maniacal killer would be a good idea.

It actually was the blood from the plumbing in my downstairs bathroom, dripping from two cast-iron joints in the drain line. Well, it wasn't blood so much as water, but still, it was making a thoomp-thoomp-thoomp sound, circling the proverbial drain. I tried to tighten the dripping cap on the cleanout to no effect, then tried to verify that it was true toilet suicide by flushing again and running back downstairs.

That's when I saw it: a gush of water such as should never be seen by anyone but a licensed plumber, going straight from my toilet tank onto the unfinished floor of my basement. The corpse of my plumbing was laid bare for me to observe in horror. I have nightmares about it. And I haven't even gone to sleep yet.

So requiescat in pace, you brave and beautiful toilet flange, and you merely mortal cast iron hub fittings. You only winked at the face of God--or at least whatever was staring down at you through the toilet bowl--for a brief time. You will be missed.

Donations in lieu of flowery-smelling air freshener can be made to me directly; I'm going to need them when the plumber bill comes.

The Length And Breadth

2007-02-28T21:19:00.000-05:00

Updated: answers are now posted in the comments section; see the sixth entry.

The following trivia questions have all flashed into my head while it was going well over 55 miles per hour, soaked in caffeine, with one eye out for the cops. Answer these, and you are a true Road Warrior And Son Or Daughter Of The Commonwealth of Massachusetts:

1) What is only municipality in Massachusetts with a five syllable name?

2) How many municipalities in Massachusetts have but a one-syllable name? How many can you name?

3) How many municipalities in Massachusetts begin with "West"? A hint: there are more than ten!

4) What is the name and population of the smallest town (by population) in Massachusetts?

5) People in North Adams know that we are the smallest city (by population) in Massachusetts. What is the largest town?

6) Sort these drives from one town in Massachusetts to its "New" namesake in order of distance:

     A. Bedford -> New Bedford
     B. Boston-> New Boston
     C. Braintree-> New Braintree
     D. Marlborough-> New Marlborough
     E. Salem-> New Salem

7) How many different Interstate Highways run within Massachusetts' borders?

8) What's the highest-numbered state route (that is, excluding US and Interstate routes) in Massachusetts?

9) How many state routes in Massachusetts carry an "A" designation (for example, Route 8A)?

10) Finally, a good long one that really earns you a Golden Fastlane if you nail it: starting on Mass Route 2 and heading east from Town of Williamstown, name every municipality you pass through before you make it into the City of Boston.

I was going to put the answers in the comments, but Tara convinced me it was more interactive to let you guess for a little while. What ya got, road geeks?

My Friend Apathy

2007-02-20T23:33:00.000-05:00

It has been two weeks since I've posted anything, hasn't it.

I suppose I should more ashamed of myself than I am. But really, anybody who's ever done a software release cycle knows what it's like at the very end. For those not in the know, it is best described as "a stinky gray tornado of toxicity".

Picture this: it is mere hours from the release date that cannot be moved, and a bitter mixture of cold pizza, bad coffee, and discarded integrity drips from the cubicle dividers and stains the gray low-pile carpeting. The stench of self-righteousness gets into your clothing, your hair, your soul. Egos are stroked and shredded in the same breath. The name-calling, trash-talking, threats, compromises, and raw nerves that have all been stewing together in a broth of hacky code and last-minute requirements are finally and exhaustedly ladled out to become the CD you buy or web site you log into, only to hear two days later that there's some cutesie open-source crap that does the same damn thing, but for free, and with a vaguely European animal mascot.

Well, maybe it's not quite so dramatic. But there have been some pretty long hours this month. And it's been coupled with an abnormally acute attack of absolute apathy.

This recent weird sense of not giving a crap about the issues of the day is foreign to me; there's usually something going on that's got my boxers in a knot. But between the long hours spent computing for hire, this weeks-long stretch of Global Warming's Revenge, and the lackluster choice of issues presented to the consumers of local news, I truly have been unable to work my way up to anything beyond a mild lather about much that has taken place over the last half-month.

Time Warner, Anna Nicole, the Iraq Resolution, Scooter's trial, slot machines: eh.

Not that some of this stuff isn't important, and not that I have no opinions about them. There's just not enough habañero in any of those issues to make me want to squeeze out a few hundred words. Picking my battles, I guess. Saving up my vital juices for the next regularly-scheduled rousing of the rabble.

In that respect, there is a lot to be said for apathy. It allows one to step back and really just not care about some things. Put a little effort into it and you could probably think of well over a dozen people who would be more universally admired if they were only a bit more apathetic. Putting all your energy into rooting for a cause that in the end you have no control over anyway just adds to your overall level of stress and in general makes you less fun to be around, you know? So why not just take some time, here during the bleak midwinter, to just slow down and ignore the roses?

There. I'm starting to feel better already.

Forgotten to add: I wanted to make you all aware of a great event coming up that you can get behind: Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Berkshire County is holding a sweet event called "Bowling for Kids Sake" over at the Mt. Greylock Bowl in North Adams on March 10th. You can either sponsor a bowling team, or provide much-needed support by visiting the web page at FirstGiving.com. There's also an article (with heavy emphasis on the inevitable "balls" puns that crop up whenever bowling is involved) at iBerkshires.com. This one's about the kids, folks, so don't cheap out now. Our gratitude will be gi-normous. How could you not want that?

The North Berkshire Restaurant Virus

2007-02-06T14:12:00.000-05:00

It's like the bubonic plague for eating establishments around here: word comes down today that Breda's Restaurant up on the Curran Highway is done. The bar and bowling alley continue on, but the building's owner has put the hammer down on Antoinette Breda's lease. The doors closed yesterday.

Antoinette was in tears today as she said her farewells to the members of the North Adams Rotary, whose weekly meetings she has happily hosted for some time. Today we held our final meeting there, but had to bring lunch in from, of all places, Papa Gino's. Give me a slice of irony, please, and a garden salad with bitter dressing.

Her story was pretty typical of a small restauranteuse caught in the fatal crossfire of dining and real estate: a couple of late checks, a missed phone call, and a landlord seemingly eager to declare her in default of her lease. That's all it takes. Just a few months ago we were told that she was going to start home delivery of her city's-best pizza, and now we're going to wait until she finds a new home before we can order another one of her special chicken bruschetta pies. Our hearts go out to her; it was really a great relationship while it lasted.

And now our small but feisty club needs to find another home. It has to be open on Tuesdays, provide reasonable privacy for when we have a speaker, and it would be really nice to know that they'll still be open six months from now.

What's in the water up here that kills eating establishments? And why has it been so particularly virulent over the last dozen or so months?

Think about it: Breda's, Gideon's, EGL. Gringo's. Hickory Bill's. The Sugar Llama. Christina's, the Lakeside, the Taconic, the Four Acres. Jae's leaving North Adams and taking over Le Jardin (this has been pushed back to March, so you still have a few weeks to sail on the sushi boat up there). And, disturbingly, rumors of distress are now flying about Red Sauce on Ashland Street. At this rate, by summer all that'll be left will be Chinese buffets, fast food, and the deli counter at the Price Chopper.

I realize that restaurants and marriages nowadays have similar life expectancies, but this seems even weirder than normal. People do purchase prepared food here, even in winter. Some places have been able to manage themselves really well over a span of years. So what separates the dining men from the nibbling boys?

It doesn't appear to be related to the food itself. Some of the places that have been around for a while present uninspiring efforts on the actual plates, while places like Breda's and EGL had some flashes of true greatness. Nor does it seem to be related to the holy retail trinity of parking, price point, and perception: you can't be too snooty, too expensive, or too hard to get to. Most of these now defunct establishments had plenty of space and were reasonably priced.

Not surprisingly, I have my underinformed yet impeccably spelled and punctuated opinion: to paraphrase Fitzgerald, restaurant people are not like you and me. I've heard rumors that the Lakeside and Gideon's closings had more to do with personal intriguery than customers and cash. It just seems that high-cash, low-supervision environments that depend on one person doing the books, combined with the unexplainable attraction restauranteurs have for personal drama, lead to all sorts of problematic situations down the road. It takes a special kind of person to throw the dice and navigate the perilous road of opening a publick house, especially if they don't own the land or building. Scary as it is, the risk-taker mentality necessary to get a thing off the ground is the same mentality that, if not checked, dooms a place in the end.

Well, there are still a bunch of competitors for the North Berkshire dining dollar, and this is truly sometimes just the way things go. So long, Antoinette, and good luck finding a soft place to land.

Meanwhile, does anybody want to serve a decent lunch to a stouthearted group of Rotarians?

Yeah, But It's A Dry Cold

2007-01-29T23:43:00.000-05:00

This latest cold snap has forced me to become more aware of my piping than ever before.

They say a man never truly gets to know his house until he's had to buy two hundred feet of 3/4" foam pipe insulation. Well, whoever "they" are, they're overdue for their meds. But they're right, especially when you have an old house whose plumbing and electrical systems were thoughtfully installed several dozen years after the place was constructed.

When it's so cold they've had to call off the 108th Annual Write-Your-Name-In-The-Snow Competition, you wake up in the morning wanting to know two things: 1) Did my pipes freeze overnight? and 2) Why the hell didn't I spring for heated toilet seats?

I'll leave the second question unanswered for the time being and concentrate on what I've been doing to not have to ask the first. Mostly, it's involved a lot of hoping that it won't get too much colder. I mean, there's only so much I can do with a 127-year-old plank-built house.

One thing I have in my favor is that I don't have a lot of pipes running through interior walls. The piping for the entire first floor runs through the basement and comes up through ingeniously placed holes in the floor. The risers to the 2nd floor are in one of two pipe chases, or in two or three cases, ingeniously placed holes in both the first and second floors. So I figure as long as I keep the temperature within the house reasonable, and the basement above about 31.9 degrees, I should be able to not worry about it so much and concentrate instead on installing heated toilet seats.

The pipe insulation angle is supposedly very important in a house like mine, which is heated with hot water baseboard. I'm not 100% positive about this, though. I have this possibly incredibly underinformed idea that the exposed copper hot water pipes in my basement actually serve to heat the surrounding air just enough to keep the cold water pipes from freezing, and that insulating them may bring the basement temperature low enough to cause one supremely ruined day. Informal poll: do any of you insulate or heat exposed piping in your basement? The hot or cold pipes or both? Foam noodles? Sticky insulation tape? Standing there blowing on it?

The surrounding air temperature issue worried me as well. Last Wednesday when we hit 3 below, I spent the day wearing a hat and scarf, sitting next to an electric space heater like a charter member of the Ladies Auxilliary. This led to the great Draft Hunt of 2007, where I became friends with my new favorite substance: rope caulk weatherstripping. Just say it three times fast and you'll think as much of it as I do. I ran around the house feeling around for places where the cold air was coming in, and lemmetellya, that stuff sealed up around window and door frames and cold molding joints like magic. Beats the regular foam weatherstrip silly. And, need I point out again: fun to say. Rope caulk weatherstripping!

I got some window frame shrink-wrap for the window in the cold downstairs bathroom, and covered up some small leftover dings in the kitchen wall and ceiling that were sucking up my hard-earned warm air. So between that and plastic sheeting, foil tape, regular weatherstripping, and my trusty caulk gun, this last week I've been able to get to the point where I'm no longer wanting to stand around a trash fire in a 55-gallon drum in my living room. As much fun as that sounds, I'm not quite sure that'll come off as such a great decision come this May.

Which sure seems like a long way from now, doesn't it?

The Final Frontier

2007-01-22T19:54:00.000-05:00

I did some pointless research and have come up with this meaningless statistic: for 53 out of the 168 upcoming hours of this week, there will be an episode of the Star Trek franchise running somewhere on my basic cable tier.

Before I start in earnest: I know about the kind of people who have that whole pathological attraction to the whole Trek universe. People who speak Klingon, or have argued about what happens during a warp core breach. Well, they are what they are. They make you feel a little bit better about yourself by not being like them. And like most normal people, I've never read a technical manual for the USS Enterprise, nor did I meet my spouse at a Trek convention.

This post isn't about bashing Trekkies, though. I've just watched too much TV.

All Trek episodes make valid thematic points: technology in service to mankind, respect for all sentient beings, firing only in self-defense. That's nice and everything, but as I'm sure the people who worked on them would tell you, they're just TV shows. Sets, scripts, actors...frequently of less-than-award-winning quality.

I mean, really: there's always some junk-science-driven plot device--a "temporal anomaly", or weird energy surge that screws up the Holodeck--that turns into another great excuse to put the cast into period costumes and solve some sort of geekgasm-inducing technical problem. Along the way there are zillions of species with ugly foreheads that speak perfect English, an uncanny amount of references to late 20th-century Earth, and lot of wild guesses that turn out to be correct, just in time to save the ship from being eaten by interphasic space leeches.

And so, so much overacting. These are performances that stand the test of time. Watch and see: forty years from now they'll be teaching classes in overacting at UCLA solely with Trek clips. The serial offenders were the comic relief characters like Quark (ugh) and Neelix (ugggggghhhhh); even worse was when they played Data for laughs. I always prayed for an anvil to fall out of the sky onto Brent Spiner's head right after watching TNG episodes like that. Or--heaven forgive me--the movie that came out about 3 years ago.

But the absolute biggest problem is that Star Trek takes the very real concepts that physical scientists and cosmologists have been working to discover for several thousand years and completely urinates all over them. There are multiple generations of human beings who now absolutely know to the core of their souls that faster-than-light space travel is just a matter of time from being a reality. That there's a whole bunch of space-mobile, technologically-advanced aliens that look like bit-part actors with latex ridges on their foreheads. That we are just a few years away from transporters, replicators, force fields, phasers, artificial gravity, and being able to remodulate the shields to the spectrum frequency of the warp engines and re-route power to the tractor beam.

Sorry, Charlie. It's fiction. Space is big, cold, and pretty much empty. Chances are good that not only will we never be able to get out of our own solar system in a generation's worth of travel time, but also that nobody from out of the cosmos is going to show up with technology that completely violates everything we've known to be true about physics.

This is true of all of science fiction, but for some reason the way Trek has ingrained itself into human consciousness and its absolute ubiquity make it more singularly responsible for its ability to suck humanity squarely out of the realm of reality.

We'll just have to be happy where we are for a while.

There's some breaking news I get as I finish up this post: EGL on Eagle Street is gone. For good. And Gideon's is closed indefinitely, but may reopen. It doesn't seem to be from a lack of business so much as owner Bill Gideon's overall financial picture. But I, and so many of our friends who loved the place, are just crushed at this news. It couldn't even make it until the movie theater opened. Anybody want to form a real estate investment trust and buy the building from whoever owns it and let Vaal run a restaurant? Anybody have any suggestions about where we should have the February Drinking Liberally meeting?

Two Topics For Your Perusal

2007-01-16T19:19:00.001-05:00

CHB points out today's Globe article about newly-elected Middle Berkshire Register of Deeds Andy Nuciforo hunting down a new office by the right hand of His Excellency The Governor: Insurance Commissioner. Frank Phillips credits a half-dozen "former Senate and political colleagues on Beacon Hill" on background (of course) saying they've been approached for advice by Our Former State Senator in bolting from the "sinecure" job (their words, not mine) that he's had to slog through for all of two weeks now.

But the next sound you hear will be a distinct scoffing noise: "A senior adviser [isn't it advisor?] to the governor said the former state senator probably would not get the position, although he may be granted an interview," says another anonymously sourced Deep Throat Wannabe with a view of Louisburg Square. Yow! Burned!

I was gambling that the next time we would hear from Registrar Nuciforo would be shortly after John Olver somehow fails in his attempt to beat Silvio Conte's record for generations come and gone while still Congressman. The Jane Swift Strategy, if you will. I lost that bet, but my next one is this: we're looking at a non-story. Trial balloon, leaked to the press for some kind of reaction, and shot down in flames with a 50-caliber anonymous quote.

Transcript editor Glenn Drohan has popped up with some regularity on the blogosphere of late. He showed up at Drinking Liberally last week (hey, the man knows a movement when he sees it, even if it was a smallish group this time), and today he spoke at the North Adams Rotary Club meeting. He covered a variety of topics, but most relevant to this forum is this: he's aware that the Transcript web site ain't exactly winning awards for its interactive content. You got "mailto" links--so 1995--and no discussion boards for readers to provide feedback.

Here is where we, the intrepid providers of local interest blather, have a chance to provide what today's great corporate minds call "synergy" (or "leverage". or maybe "dynamic customer-facing revenue paradigm", or something like that). I can see a highly visible little hotspot on the Transcript's headline and item pages (especially on Opinion and Local pieces) linking to a portal page with a list of the active Berkshire blogs--featuring an RSS feed displaying headlines from the last 10 or so days. Maybe even sell ad space on this page, too. Anyway, we can funnel the howmanyever thousand readers directly into the blogosphere and really kick the participation level up a notch. Greg, Wes, Andy, Margie, Jack, Eric? Howard? John Mitchell? What do we think?

Also, an aside shared by Glenn: not enough people are writing letters to the editor. Apparently, this is the feature that the average newspaper reader turns to immediately after the obituaries. Lots of people read them, but it seems nobody's writing them any more. Well, almost nobody. Certainly fewer than before, and not counting sitting City Councilors. So write a letter to the editor, if you gots the notion.

Bonus third topic: Wes Flinn passed around an internet meme and basically called me out on it. Well, if he can do it, so can I. Similar responses invited.

1. Name a book that you want to share so much that you keep giving away copies: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and its sequels The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and Life, the Universe, and Everything by the late Douglas Adams.

2. Name a piece of music that changed the way you listen to music: Surrender, by Cheap Trick. The first song I ever played in a band with other musicians. I've never been the same.

3. Name a film you can watch again and again without fatigue: History of the World, Part I.

4. Name a performer for whom you suspend of all disbelief: Christoper Walken. Can there be any doubt this guy ACTUALLY IS a Bond villain, Captain Koontz, or just plain needs more cowbell?

5. Name a work of art you'd like to live with: M.C. Escher's Relativity.

6. Name a work of fiction which has penetrated your real life: I'm not going to explain this, but both Tara and I agree that it's a combination of two: South Park and Gilmore Girls. Really.

7. Name a punchline that always makes you laugh: From #3 above:
     "Do you know the penalty for a slave that strikes a Roman citizen? OK...you. You had your hand up first."
     "Death by torture!"
     "No."
     "Crucifixion!"
     "No.....you?"
     "They shove a living snake up your ass!"
     "Ah, no... but that's very creative."

Votus Interruptus

2007-01-09T17:52:00.000-05:00

Margie Ware's latest blog post and the related AP story in the Boston Globe drop the sledgehammer news that Dan Bosley--and his 20 years tenure in the State Legislature--are staying right where they are. The post of economic development advisor, if it is in fact being filled, is not being filled by Berkshire County's senior legislative delegate to the State House.

The Globe/AP story quotes a statement from Governor Patrick: "After further discussion with Rep. Dan Bosley, he and I have agreed that the most effective role he can play in fostering economic growth and advancing our agenda for business development in Massachusetts is in the Legislature." It also curiously enough decided to mention Dan's opposition to and Deval's promotion of slot machines within the Commonwealth, without ever really coming out and saying this was the base reason behind the split-up.

This is good news, in a way. The 1st Berkshire district keeps a proven senior legislator and committee chairman in the State House, and we aren't going to have to go through what was looking to be a divisive intradistrict election cycle.

On the other hand, on the surface this looked like a great move for Dan--getting a nice raise and moving away from the alternate year election kerfuffles and General Court politics while putting his experience to use in a statewide, high-profile executive position with a hotline to Deval's desk. It can't be that this decision was taken lightly by either party, and maybe someday we will know the whole story.

It's a bit disappointing for those of us who like a bit of action in our local political scenery. All I know is that I came back from a soul-ripping visit to my dentist in Dalton to an email from Margie cancelling an upcoming campaign meeting, and reading her blog post confirming the news and saying that she's not coming to Drinking Liberally tonight (7pm at EGL, still formerly Gideon's Nightery, on Eagle St. in North Adams).

It's probably for the best as far as the legislative interests of the district is concerned, but my heart goes out to Marge, Gailanne Cariddi, Dick Alcombright, Joe Solomon, Ed MacDonald, and anybody else who had to go through the gut and wallet wrenching decisions to run or not run for the open seat. It couldn't have been easy.

At least we have the City Council race to gear up for this summer, eh?

UPDATE: Well, maybe we didn't have to wait that long for answers to some of these questions, and they come from an intriguing source indeed. Mayor John Barrett III was quoted in a late followup piece on boston.com: "The original offer was not the same as the final offer, and it would not have given him the opportunity to impact economic development policy. It was better for him to remain in the Legislature. As he said to me, he didn’t need the job just to fatten his pension."

In fact, the whole thing sounds just as called in a comment by winmurcran around 7:00 this evening, who could have run with this story pretty much as written three and a half hours before the Globe ran it. Not sure if he'd have gotten the JBIII quote, though. Dude, if you don't send me an email telling me where you get some of the background stuff you've come up with over the last few months, I'm going to edit your comments to say "in bed" after each sentence like a fortune cookie, like "sounds to me like bosley made the right choice to avoid being a staffer without much executive authority in bed. he'll be more helpful to the berkshires and the governor from the house in bed."

Anyone Catch This In Yesterday's Globe?

2007-01-05T14:18:00.000-05:00

Geographically challenged Boston Globe reporter Matt Viser includes this unintentionally comedic aside in a story filed for yesterday's paper, titled "Patrick may overturn Romney picks":

In 2006...the Patrick-Murray ticket won 53 of the 60 communities in Worcester County. The two Democrats won the city of Worcester by 19,100 votes, and even carried Sturbridge, the hometown of Reed Hillman, the running mate of Republican gubernatorial candidate Kerry Healey.

Several people from the area were appointed to positions in the Patrick administration. Patrick's chief economic development adviser, Representative Daniel E. Bosley, is from North Adams.

According to Google maps, if you start at the Post Office on Ashland St here in beautiful 01247 and go out Rte 2 to I-190 down to Worcester, it's 111 miles. One hundred eleven miles is the distance from, say, Twin Donut in Allston to Brattleboro, Vermont. Or from City Hall Plaza in Boston to New London, CT. Noice woik, Magellan.

Hopefully, Boz will straighten them out before his next trip back home here to the Worcester County area. Does this mean Marlborough is a local call now? Are we now a 10-minute drive to the Centrum? Where did they put Springfield, now, down by New Haven, Connecticut?

When I lived back east, I used to maintain that we could draw two lines starting in Deerfield, MA, on I-91: one running northwest to Williamstown and one running southwest to Bash Bish Falls. Of the resulting three triangles created by those lines, I-91, and the Massachusetts border, you could cede the northernmost one to Vermont, the central one to New York, and the southern one to Connecticut. Very few Mass residents east of I-91 would notice any of it, and frankly I always thought it'd make a better fit.

Although now that I live here--well, I pretty much feel the same way.

I have friends back in Essex and Middlesex Counties who couldn't find North Adams on a map with a sextant, compass, and Mayor John Barrett III standing next to them. But they're not the newspaper with the largest circulation in New England, are they? I call for an IMMEDIATE correction. And a free subscription. Their funny pages are pretty good, and they have some of the best sportswriters in the country covering my teams. However, until they actually send their reporters out to see the Commonwealth that they cover--or at least have them look at a map--then I guess I'm stuck with the not-unpleasant local ham-and-egg operations. They're a bit light on the Boston sports, but hell, I guess that's why Al Gore invented the Internets.

The Death Of Saddam

2006-12-30T13:10:00.000-05:00

Proving once again the unprovable adage that things happen in threes, former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has joined former US President Gerald Ford and former Soul Godfather James Brown in eternal repose this week.

The difference is that Saddam was killed by human hands, fulfilling the execution of a sentence handed down by what history could easily refer to as a kangaroo court some years from now. It will depend on who's writing that history.

Saddam was a brutal dictator who perpetuated tyrannic minority rule, abusing his countrymen to further his personal agenda. A sociopath who started torturing animals as a child, he fulfilled every stereotype of a bloated medieval monarch: raping the Iraqi treasury for his own luxury, handing out death sentences to reduce political opposition, sanctioning torture for fun and profit.

In short, the guy was a real asshole.

The question in my mind really isn't "does he deserve to die", because people deserve to forfeit their lives for a lot less than that. But I actually disagree with Saddam's death sentence on several fronts:

I'm not a big fan of the death penalty in general, for almost all of the standard anti-death penalty reasons. I say "almost" because there's so little doubt of the man's complicity in so much vile behavior that the "possibility of innocence" argument holds no sway here. But it is the mark of a larger, more enlightened, and nobler society to rise above the "eye for an eye" sentencing mentality, which could never be carried out here since Saddam had fewer than several dozen thousand eyes. Yes, it's a more viscerally satisfying solution to many, and certainly cheaper, but less civilized, as brutal as the crimes that were committed, and in the end, it's not going to deter the next schmuck dictator from anything.

There's no better way than to rally the former Ba'athists and minority Sunnis than to martyrize the guy who gave his life thumbing his nose at the government now occupying their country. As we've been finding out over the last 3+ years, our own leaders viewed the Iraqi attitude toward Saddam through the most naive and sycophantic lenses available. Like it or not, the dude had some sort of a fan club, who now have guns, water bottles filled with C4 and twelve penny nails, and a real grudge against the dudes in the sand-colored uniforms. Killing Saddam is just one more reason for Akbar down the street in old Tikrit to bitch about American propagandizing and finally pick up a rocket launcher aimed at your neighbor's nephew. Or your own nephew. Or daughter. Or husband. You get it.

Old Saddam was hardly unique in the universe of dictators. He was only one of a 40 or 50 card set. And not even on the 2002 All-Star Dictator team when we took him down. Compare him to luminaries like the recently deceased King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, Borat's Kazakh pal Nursultan Nazarbeyev, Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il, and Zimbabwe shortstop Robert Mugabe. Do we need to take those guys out, too? Why not? Every word said about Saddam Hussein is true about at least two dozen other world leaders. When does it end? Or is it really--gasp--just political cover to explain away the covert motivations of a simplistic-minded group of Americans who by accident of birth and cynical manipulation of the 2000 elections, blundered their way into power? We can't arrest and kill them all. Nor should we.

Someone's going to come back and say that this is the Iraqi government and Iraqi people doing this--that he was convicted in an Iraqi, not American, court, and executed by Iraqi, not American, hands. That, friend, is drinking the Kool-Aid with a big ol' bendy straw. One or two words whispered in Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki's ear by his American handlers determined Hussein's fate. It's not for the Iraqi people's benefit, surely; Saddam's sentencing pales in comparison to the issues faced by the Iraqi government and people today, rent by civil war, trying to pull together security, energy, and transportation infrastructures with hose clamps and duct tape, and getting a meal and drink of clean water. Not killing Saddam doesn't cause a big problem in day-to-day Iraq, so this becomes a symbolic gesture. And right now, the United States of America is running the Iraqi Department of Symbolism.

One final point: Saddam wanted to die. He craved martyrdom for himself. In effect, a better punishment would have been to let him rot for his remaining 12 or 15 years of life in an unheated, uncooled 8'x8' cell in an Iraqi prison without access to the media or his followers. Defeated, broken, and irrelevant, discarded in favor of the true future of Iraq. That's how he should have ended, not at the end of a rope.

Look: at the time of the invasion--and even today's New York Post article about Saddam's execution admits this--Iraq posed no serious threat to American security. No, the excuses were just that, and now this execution is made of as much hot air and bull feces as was the pretense handed to the American public in Q1 2003. He was a monster and bastard, no doubt; but there were more reasons to leave him alive and suffering than to turn him into more fuel for the fire of violence burning in the Middle East.

Questions That Really Matter, Volume II

2006-12-26T00:58:00.000-05:00

In my last edition of "Questions That Really Matter", we discovered once and for all that everybody really does hate Ann Coulter, and that 72 virgins await you in Paradise if you arrive there after choking on a chili dog from Jack's on Eagle Street.

In today's installment, we focus the heatlamp of scrutiny onto America's newest fusion of Chemistry and Dessert: Betty Crocker's Warm Delights. Perhaps you've seen these ads on television. The one I think I remember has some woman sidling into an elevator at her office eating one of these things--the "molten chocolate" variety, if memory serves--and having a censor-friendly simulated choco-gasm in front of a justifiably curious coworker. It's a new product, designed to simulate the hot gooey essence of something actually delicious, but costs less than $3.00 and can be prepared in less time than it takes to chew a couple of Rolaids.

In the interest of you, the American Consumer, I, along with my wife and our friends P and K, undertook the perilous yet sugar-sweetened task of teasing the truth out of this Question That Really Matters: Can The Single Most Overprocessed Food On North American Store Shelves Today Provide A Satisfactory Eating Experience Without Doing Permanent Damage To Either Human Physiology Or The Environment?

For our experiment, we went with a one-to-one ratio of dessert varieties to dessert judgment officials. Four out of the seven variations of Warm Delights were selected at random from a local retailer and purchased for the on-sale price of $1.79 apiece. Flavors selected, pictured below, beginning in the upper left and moving clockwise: "Lemon Swirl Cake", "Fudgy Chocolate Chip Cookie", "Cinnamon Swirl Cake", and the aforementioned "Molten Chocolate Cake":

Each package, when opened, contains a plastic bowl, a packet of powder, and a packet of goo containing 94% pure processed sugar, 5.9% pure trans fat, and 0.1% pure artificial and natural flavoring. You dump the powder into some water, stir, spurt the goo as artistically as possible into the resulting puddle, and microwave for a bit. Let stand to congeal appropriately, and voila--dessert fit for a king, queen, or ace of any suit.

The panel initially held debate on the question "Does It Even Come Close To Looking Like The Picture On The Box". This topic was not expected to generate much controversy, as anyone who is not blind and looks at pictures of food would probably predict. However, once the panel actually compared fork-based real-life product to that shown on the box, it became fairly clear that we hadn't really looked closely enough at the boxes: there just wasn't that much difference between the two. It was only then did we realize just how bogus and unappetizing the box pictures actually look. Another case of art imitating life. Points off for it, nonetheless.

Then, the metaphorical rubber met the allegorical road, as the panel actually ingested the results of all our stirring, squeezing, and button-pushing.

The chocolate-heavy options (the molten cake and the "cookie") had a heavy, doughlike consistency that can most accurately be described as "hot, heavy, and doughlike". Think microwaved Pillsbury dough. The cookie, of course, had that whole thing down in spades, although its chocolate flavor (artificially flavored fudge) was much better than the cake's (artificially flavored devil's food). In fact, the cake was pretty much like eating a supremely undercooked Hostess Chocolate Cupcake drizzled with three year old Hershey's syrup. Neither of the two females present had any sort of choco-gasm. Not even a choco-sigh of contentment.

The non-chocolate candidates were the Cinnamon and Lemon cakes. I was in charge of spurting the goo on top of the Cinnamon cake, and as can be expected out of any decent clod with a packet of shelf-stable icing, I made a total mess of the whole thing. So artistically it was a failure. The panel, meanwhile, reacted universally with a resounding "Eh", reflecting large-scale indifference. We don't recommend it unless you have a cinnamon swirl cake fetish, not a lot of time, and have to make up your recommended daily allowance of distilled monoglycerides.

The winner of the competition--the Gold Medalist of our little Special Dessert Olympics--was the Lemon Swirl Cake. It was actually light(ish) and fluffy(ish), and the lemon goo had that great Lemon Life Saver taste that indicates the highest quality artificial lemon flavor. We all went "Hmm" after eating it, and those of us who can raise one eyebrow did so. Our only comment was that there's actually no need to serve this one warm; it probably would be fine completely cool, but waiting for these things to fully congeal and cool goes so far against the Warm Delights ethos that it wasn't even seriously considered.

So there you have it--dessert just like Grandma used to make, assuming Grandma was a multibillion dollar congolomerate with easy access to cellulose powder, tocopherol, and potassium sorbate as a preservative. Do yourself a favor, and if absolutely must come up with a hot dessert, microwave a Twinkie or something. It's cheaper and your body is probably more used to the chemicals they use.

Come back some other time for more answers to Questions That Really Matter!

Congratulations to Dan Bosley

2006-12-18T00:40:00.000-05:00

Greg Roach called this one even before the November elections. I agreed with him, even though others told me how full of crap I was.

But Andy Etman scooped me on the news that our longtime Representative in General Court and North Adams native son Daniel Bosley has accepted a position with the Patrick Administration as economic development advisor. Makes a ton and a half of sense. Dan's chairmanship of the JCED gives him a uniquely accurate picture of the economic development needs of the Commonwealth; he was an early adopter of the Patrick vision, and he's certainly spent enough time with the Guv-To-Be to ensure that they can see eye-to-eye on enough issues to make the whole thing work.

Congratulations, Mr. Bosley. Welcome to the Excecutive Branch. Your invitation to speak at a Rotary Club meeting still stands.

Sooo....special election anyone? I'm pretty sure most everyone here in the Northern Berkshire Blogging Club and Chowder Society knows who I think would be the best choice for our newest rep. Some hints: she swept the city and towns of the 1st Berkshire District in the Democratic Primary back in September. And she has a blog.

So, when does this all go down? First, they (whoever they are) have to call the special election. MGL 53.10 says: "If there is a special election to fill the office of senator or representative in congress, all certificates of nomination and nomination papers shall be filed on or before the sixth Tuesday preceding the day of such election", and this Special Election info from the Secretary of the Commonwealth's office says that special primaries happen four weeks before special elections. That leaves 2 weeks between the filing of nomination papers and the primary, then four weeks of the one-on-one campaign.

This is great news for North Adams, for Dan Bosley, and for the local blogosphere. Me, Wes, Andy, Jack, and Greg, along with Da Snoop, Chris, and the POD will be happy to bring you the running commentary and inside scoop on the race for the new face in the State House. Stay tuned!

Las Vegas: Nothing More To Say

2006-12-11T13:31:00.000-05:00

Back home after a very, very long night of travel.

Every trip I've ever taken to Las Vegas has been just one day too long. Once you've seen what you came to see here, unless you have some sort of business, gambling, or porn agenda, then there's no need to linger.

The big hotels (sorry--"Resorts"), because of high occupancy rates, have been able to eliminate what made Vegas great for travelers on a budget who could resist the gambling jones: the cheap food, drink, and room rates they dangled to get you to walk through the casinos. Now, they'll nickel-and-dime you as bad as any cheap hotel in the boonies USED to: one thing we noticed during our November Midwest roadtrip is that almost everyplace off the interstates offering you a $45-$75 room rate throws in wireless internet service, a newspaper, HBO, and a hot breakfast to get you to come in. Here in this world-class resort (the Riviera), it's 75 cents for a USA Today, $6 to fax two pages, $10 per day for (spotty) internet service, a per-minute service charge for phone calls. The coffee shop doesn't have a single sandwich under $7 (most are $8.50 and up) and coffee itself is $3.00 a cup. There's a $3.50 service charge on ATM withdrawals. You have to tip to get a decent room or a seat at a show or a restaurant. It's just amazing, what these folks get away with now.

The Strip is a nonstop construction zone. They're building a huge add-on to the Venetian over a strip mall that you could watch the Treasure Island pirate show from. The Wynn is done now, another monument to big money and even bigger ego. Hooters has opened a "resort", off the Strip, across from the Hard Rock where the San Remo used to be (no, I didn't go in. I wanted to, but was overruled). The Stardust is closed and will probably be blown up live on pay-per-view next month. I'll be interested to see when--or if--enough is ever enough out there.

But my fascination with the place, while long-standing and oft-indulged, is winding down some. My gambling jones is really nowadays only piqued by picking pro football (damn Seahawks--ONE MORE POINT and they'd have covered to make my six-way super teaser), which is fun but certainly not required to make my life complete. Getting there and back is more of a pain than ever, and there are a whole lot of places I haven't already been to seven or eight times. Thanks, Vegas. It's been fun.

If you haven't been, though, you should still go. Everybody needs to at least see the place at least once. It really is visually impressive.

Anyway, Drinking Liberally is tonight at EGL on Eagle Street in North Adams. Tara and I have now been there like four times. The food is terrific, the service is great, Vaal knows what she's doing. A wonderful addition to downtown. Mark my words--after the 7:30 or 8:00 movies let out from the new movie theater there'll be a line to get in the place. Go now while you still have elbow room. Go tonight and we can discuss the Administration's complete inability to deal with the reality of the situation in the Persian Gulf: all you folks who defend our continued presence there--how does your life change if your country "loses" a war 6500 miles away? Is establishing democracy and freedom (as we know it) even a valid concept there? Why the resistance to dealing with Iran and Syria? We have to buy our oil from someone, you know. You gotta pay for the bread whether you like the baker or not...

Don't Call Me A Quitter

2006-12-04T22:00:00.000-05:00

For a long time, I smoked cigarettes.

I started around the tag end of my senior year in high school, right after I turned 17. My father smoked. My mother and aunt and their friends did for a while as well. In fact, my mother was a nurse, and I remember as a young boy visiting her at work. There, I would watch five nurses, in the room behind the nurse's station, all firing up Tareytons and Virginia Slims not 10 feet from where people checked in to visit their ailing friends and family. This is on, God's honest truth, a cardiac wing.

I was working at an auto parts store where almost everyone who worked or shopped smoked. Most of my new friends were suburban street punks, who would sooner be caught wearing a pink angora sweater than without their blood red and pale white crush-proof box of Cowboy Killers and a Zippo lighter. It was as much a part of the uniformity of townie nonconformity as a clapped-out American car and a problem with authority.

At some point in college, during the mid-80's after smoking had ceased to be cool around academia, I persevered. I took my personal brand identity from it. It made me a rebel, in an unpleasant sort of way. The way TRUE rebels want to come off. Went perfectly with a post-adolescent identity crisis. So combine bad posture, a persistent negative attitude, poor grooming, and a inability to dress with a cloud of smoke following me down the ivy-covered halls, and you can guess how far I got up the social register. But hey, at least I had an identity.

At no point had I ever disliked smoking. I just plain enjoyed it. Never really even wanted to quit. I had stopped for a few weeks to try to impress a girl, and that pretty much went as well as you'd think something like that would go. Tara didn't really smoke when I met her, but within a year of meeting me, she was smoking regularly too. Yes, I know, there's a special place in Hell for me, thanks.

But starting a few years ago, the Tobacco Polizei gained firm control and the last throes of the pro-smoking insurgency had been pretty much crushed. By the time I qualified for my 20-year "Thank You" pin from the folks at Philip Morris (which I never got, mostly because they don't actually give them out), nobody I hung out with smoked, the things cost $7 a pack in Manhattan, and you couldn't smoke anywhere in public anyway (although there is a cool place down on 1st Ave around 11th called Sahara East with an outside garden that will rent you a big water pipe and a plug of flavored Turkish tobacco with your felafel and baba ganoush). And my father, whose first heart attack was during the Carter Administration, went through (and continues to battle with) a series of serious health crises that probably wouldn't have happened had he decided to quit earlier than he did.

So with all that, combined with Tara's "I wanna quit, so now you have to" speech, a free nicotine patch giveaway by the City of New York, and a Costco-sized bottle of Zyban, my path was made clear. On July 5th, 2005, I joined the health-ridden ranks of the Non Smokers of America. Not quite as much rebellion or brand identity. But, admittedly, less emphysema.

It was pretty ugly at first. I would get pissed off at people if I didn't like the way their blood was circulating. I couldn't stop eating. I started chewing gum, which I must not have been very good at since I was biting my tongue twice a day. I was a nicotine patch away from shivving some dude for standing in line the wrong way at the Post Office. It sucked. It sucked hard, and it sucked for a lot longer than I thought it was going to. But after six or seven weeks I stopped using the patches, and about a month after that I stopped taking the pills. It took almost a full year for the cravings to go away. Oh, I backslid once or twice along the way, but didn't fall back in.

It'll be seventeen months on Tuesday, and I'm at the point where I was annoyed when we sat in the smoking section of the Cracker Barrel in Altoona, PA last week. But news of a new smoking wonder drug in Britain just showed up, and my dad is feeling way too crappy for a guy his age. Therefore, today's good deed for the day ought to be for you to grab the nearest person you know who used to smoke and show some support for their efforts. The holiday season is bound to be tough, with more parties, more liquor, and more old friends who you used to smoke with than normal. But just make it one day at a time, don't kill yourself if you backslide for a night, and whatever you do--don't smoke around me while I'm trying to eat my hashbrown casserole at the Cracker Barrel. That's just friggin' annoying.

There And Back Again

2006-11-28T21:44:00.000-05:00

Some interesting roadtrip notes from a blogger who enjoys The Art of the Roadtrip and married someone equally as roadworthy:

We were an hour into the trip, going over the Collar City Bridge in Troy, NY, when something deep in the bowels of the Saab went pa-toink, and the idiot lights made the dash look like the USS Enterprise on red alert. We coasted down into Watervliet, NY, a town which can boast of a horde of auto service places right off the exit there in their little hamlet under the Thruway.

If the belt had lasted just a few more hours, we'd have crapped out in the middle of nowhere on I-71 in Ohio, miles from the nearest anything.

We were fortunate, though, and were able to drop it off with the good people at East Coast Tire and Auto, walk a few blocks to Bob's Diner, eat a surprisingly tasty club sandwich, drink a pretty decent cup of coffee, and come back an hour later to find it fixed. Two hours and $159 later (we replaced all four belts), we were back on The Way West. Elsewise, the Swedemobile did pretty well throughout 2,237 road miles.

This was our first multi-day roadtrip involving the passing of multiple Waffle Houses wherein the 24-hour scattered, smothered, covered, chunked, topped, and diced goodness of America's Favorite Hash Browns was not enjoyed. Instead, we ended up at the Steak & Shake, which also boasts of 24-hour goodness, more along the burger, fries, chili, and shake-type variety.

It's an interesting head-to-head road food comparison. The Waffle House is cheaper, but S&S's food is better. For the non-breakfast items, anyway. But we had a REALLY bad cup of WH coffee at a quick pit stop outside of Mansfield, Ohio, turning us off to the place for the rest of the trip. Punishment, if you will. We're vindictive when you screw with our coffee.

Besides, we ate in on Thursday and Friday. Whoo boy, did we eat. Our Thanksgiving had a soul food twist out there in the Midwest; Shark-Fu (to whom's blog I link over there on the right) whipped up the cornbread and collard greens to go with the fabulous bird and ham and fixin's. AND she made breakfast for everybody. Sister C-Money provided magical sweet potato pie and oatmeal cookies.

We ate nonstop for two days. Ah, Thanksgiving. Doing for gluttony what St. Patrick's Day has been doing for drinking, since 1863.

It was the first day of buck hunting season in Pennsylvania on Monday. We got the last room at the Best Western in Bedford (southwest PA, about an hour and change east of Wheeling, West Virginia) on Sunday night around 1:30am. The parking lot was crammed with pickup trucks, presumably owned by armed men with a serious grudge against the local male white-tailed deer population. Not a place where you'd want to start crap with random dudes hanging around the bar.

During the day Monday, the state was deserted. It seemed that most of the Solid Men of the Commonwealth of Pennyslvania were parking their trucks by the side of the road, wearing orange hats, and fixin' to kill vicious leaf-eating forest animals. Lord knows why they cut the things heads off and pay money to set up em to nail them onto walls. I'm not saying hunting deer is easy, and I'm foregoing ALL commentary on the "we have to thin the herd" concept, but really, is there that much pride to be taken in the act of finding a deer in the woods and then not missing it with a couple blasts from a 12-gauge shotgun or a laser-sighted .30-06?

Heading back to NYC tomorrow night for a day in the office on Friday. An evening around the old neighborhood, a day full of meetings, and back again for a weekend of house-related stuff. Maybe I can work off a few slices of sweet potato pie in the process. Or maybe I'll just buy pants in the next size up.

It's good to be back.

The Road Goes On...Ever, Ever On

2006-11-20T18:54:00.000-05:00

The title of the post is a reference to an abysmal song in the abysmal stage production of The Lord Of The Rings. Yes, the stage production. The MUSICAL stage production. You may have heard of it: it opened in Toronto early in '06 and closed a few months thereafter. Anyway, Tara and Winston and I roadtripped up to Toronto to see it there last spring. Quick review: it blew. Yecch. A total travesty. 27 million dollars down a big Canadian toilet. An insult to Tolkein, and an obvious cash grab by show folk, most of whom haven't the capacity to understand what was so special about the books to start with. You knew it was awful when Boromir dies towards the end of the 1st book and Aragorn breaks out into song. Now it'll be foisted upon the unsuspecting European public in London starting next May--let them discover the joy.

But its second meaning has to do with our current trip. We're on our way to a midwestern daily double. We head tomorrow morning to St Louis, Missouri, for Thanksgiving with friends. On the way back we spend a day in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana, the city that the folks who coined the term "flyover country" had in mind (sorry, Wes...couldn't resist). Since we're Saabing it, we'll probably spend Tuesday night somewhere between Erie PA and Cleveland OH. I know, you wish you were us.

So I'm just going to clean out the unmatched sock drawer of blog topics before I throw my suitcase together:

Today's USA Today produced one of the finest articles on the religious perspective on the gay marriage discussion that I've read to date. From a most unexpected source--a Baptist minister. And the USA Today, come to think of it. It's like, FINALLY, someone gets it: "Leviticus is filled with laws imposing the death penalty for everything from eating catfish to sassing your parents. If you accept one as the absolute, unequivocal word of God, you must accept them all...The truth is that mainstream religion has moved beyond animal sacrifice, slavery and the host of primitive rituals described in Leviticus centuries ago. Selectively hanging onto these ancient proscriptions for gays and lesbians exclusively is unfair according to anybody's standard of ethics."

We're done with the plumber in Pittsfield that did our heating system, and our electrician bailed on us claiming too much work. Everyone else in town is booked solid or will be out of town for the holidays. We need a couple of 20 amp circuits run to our kitchen from the panel in the basement, and our sink and dishwasher need to be plumbed in. Anybody know anyone? The electrical work is one guy for half a day, and we already have about half the 12/2 romex we'll need for the job. Anybody?

Nationally ranked Princeton (17) beat Dartmouth on Saturday; the Avocados end their season at 2-8 this year. Ivy League football is really a very strange creature in and of itself. Brings to mind very anachronistic images of guys with funny hats and bowties saying things like "Boola boola". It's almost true, too, or at least it was twenty years ago. I will say, though, that Ivy League pre-football drinking absolutely shames a lot of supposedly serious party schools. Think about it: the lunkheads in the Big 10 parking lots drink Keystone Light while stuffing themselves full of chili and sausages. Meanwhile, Ivy guys are usually belting cheap Canadian whiskey by 10AM on game days; maybe they had a bowl of oatmeal at 8. Much of the campus is totally loaded by the middle of the 2nd quarter. The football itself is kinda lame, and there are no real fans outside the people who went there. But it's got some tradition behind it, and fortunately not that many people take it too seriously. It's like a cool antique that still works: the old Victor Victrola of the football universe.

I'll probably update y'all from the Great American Middle later on this week. Have a great Thanksgiving, everybody.

Eat Spaghetti and Meatballs - Live Forever

2006-11-15T13:48:00.000-05:00

With Jae's Restaurant leaving its perch above the Curran Highway, that just about does it for decent Chinese food up here. Don't keep telling me about Chopsticks, either. Every time we go there, we're reminded of how absolutely miserable the service is. They've never gotten our order right the first time; there's been one or more of the proprietor's family's screaming kids running around, and we have to ask like four times for mustard. Mustard! Jeez. You can't get the mustard right, you might as well sell out and become a Taco Bell.

So now that there's going to be one less place to eat in town, that should make you think about alternate ways of putting food on your family (Thank you, Mr. President) for a good price and for a good cause.

Enter the North Adams Rotary Club (nice web site, huh? that's me. give me a call if you want a site done for cheap) and their Spaghetti Supper. I think I've plugged this before when it was supposed to be in October, but since we've moved it to this coming Thursday, you still have a chance to help out our club's truly good work right here in the city. And get meatballs in the process.

You can also get strawberry pie. Longtime residents and other fans of Lawrence Welk may remember DiLego's Diner by the post office. Apparently their pie recipe is right up there with Class A narcotics in terms of addictive potential, and we only make it once a year. So there's probably reason enough to come by St. Anthony's (NOT the American Legion!) on Thursday, early. Like 4:00pm. Or, you can call Paul DiLego at 884-4017 to reserve a pie. They're $12 for a whole pie. And I won't complain if you write it off as a charitable donation. Of course, I'm not the IRS, but they have such a reputation for being so nice. How can you go wrong?

And if you look ono page A6 of today's Transcript, there's a great picture of some cute chick who really kneads the dough. Reason enough to hit the pasta fest.

And since our fall foliage Burgervaganza was rained on the way it was, this is our big chance to raise funds for the Christmas Party we throw for some of the kids in town that wouldn't normally get one. It's for the kids! You don't hate kids, do you?

Notice how this is an easier sell than the telemarketing firm trying to push cop tickets and keep 75% of the take...and a much better deal than a fake Jimmy Buffet concert. See you there, then? Swell!

We Drink, But Only From The Left Side Of The Glass

2006-11-13T23:41:00.000-05:00

Well, if it isn't that time of the month again.

The November Drinking Liberally meeting is Tuesday night the 14th at EGL, formerly Gideon's Nightery, at 23 Eagle St in North Adams. This'll be the first time there, since it's just opened up as EGL about three weeks ago. So it'll be a new experience for all of us. Ah, change. Something conservatives hate, right? At least in the classical definition of the word "conservative", anyway.

It's been an interesting month in the Northern Berkshire political scene since the last meeting, hasn't it? If this meeting is anything like that last one, there'll be a whole room full of interesting folks who like to talk politics. And there's a lot to talk about:

What's Deval Patrick going to do, who's he going to do it with, and are any Northern Berkshire Democrats going to be there?
Impeachment--still just a fantasy with Pelosi and Murtha in charge?
The Mass. Congressional delegation--suddenly VERY powerful! What can we expect from them given the new majority?
Giuliani, Romney, Pataki, McCain, or Huckabee vs. Gore, Clinton, Obama, or Kerry in '08?
Berkshire Republicans--can they even challenge Ben Downing for his seat in 2 years?
The Thing With The City Council Impeachment Resolution--has it changed anything? Should it?

These topics and many others are available for discussing, and you know you want to check out the new place to get liquor by the glass on the block. I'll be there with Tara, and we're both looking forward to seeing old friends and making a few new ones. Sound like fun? You know it does!

Dumb Ideas Worth Considering, Volume I

2006-11-11T17:44:00.000-05:00

Now that the elections are over, I wanted to bring up one of those topics that interests only me and a few other people that are no fun at parties. The kind that makes Tara roll her eyes and tell me how boring I can be. You want fun and exciting, come back in a few days. Or start your own blog. Because today, I'm writing about publicly financed, a.k.a. "clean", elections.

This one has supporters on the left (Barack Obama, Common Cause) as well as the right (George Voinovich, Lou Dobbs), although it seems to be traditionally considered another wacko progressive pinko issue, like suing people who deny your civil rights, or speaking your mind without going to jail.

I know. Those darn libs, huh?

The Supreme Court took a very narrow view of money equaling political free speech in Buckley v. Valeo (424 US 1) in 1976, which invalidated provisions of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971. One of those provisions limited the personal contribution individual candidates can give to their own campaign to a paltry $10 million, but the ruling overturned this on the grounds that these limitations restricted political speech (in the form of money) without any compelling government reason to do so. Right now, this along with McConnell v. FEC (540 US 93, 2003, which upheld the McCain-Feingold reforms) is the outstanding case law, taking a real dump on any realistic chance for change.

But after spending all autumn watching a bunch of millionaires thrash it out to get elected, and knowing that the more money you have the less reality you usually have to face, my question is becoming more and more pointed. Why are we allowing the system to deteriorate to the point where you have to basically be able to crap $20 bills or suck corporate...um...you know...to finance a political campaign? I think the "compelling government reason" is starting to make itself pretty evident.

Sometimes the best qualified legislators--the true voices of the people--are forced to turn away from the political arena because they'd either be beholden to stinky special-interest PAC money or go bankrupt gunning for what is technically a low-paying government job. It becomes solely a rich person's game. Not that ALL wealthy people are bad politicians, but it just doesn't seem fair that wealth is a prerequisite to declaring a serious candidacy.

So what to do?

1) Sue again under McCain-Feingold until we find an appeals court that realizes that Clean Elections will actually yield a better class of candidate than the average shmoe we have around now.

2) Allow for the objections raised in both Buckley and McConnell by reducing the reason for having to raise the kind of money you need nowadays. It's painfully obvious that most of the money raised goes to buying television and radio advertising. If the FCC were to mandate free or reduced cost media time for all balloted candidates (the same way it mandates public service announcements, the Emergency Broadcast System, and no swearing or nudity), then go ahead, raise the money, and spend it on megaphones and bumper stickers, because media time is cheap, on a level playing field, and available to all qualified candidates equally. Somebody smarter than me will have to figure out how to guarantee equality to write-in candidates. I don't know. How about a federally funded "The Election Channel"?

3) Some states, such as Maine, provide a "clean" option for candidates who choose to run that way. It's not a mandatory system and candidates can opt out, so it's up to the voters to value the clean candidates appropriately. Yeah, I wouldn't think it would help in states with any more than 6 electoral votes either; but it is an option and I wanted to bring it up.

The whole core of the issue is an opinion call, anyway. Both Buckley and McConnell were split decisions; McConnell was 5-4. Britain and a bunch of other countries run publicly financed elections and their civilizations haven't come crumbling down yet, so the whole doom-and-gloom slippery slope scenarios that opponents paint are a bit of a scare tactic.

If this last election doesn't prove the importance of getting the best candidates out there and forcing them to sharpen their messages, then nothing will. And just keep in mind that if you do what you've always done, don't be surprised when things turn out the way they always have.

Honey, next time, I promise to try to be less boring.

What Do I Win?

2006-11-09T01:47:00.000-05:00

A little over a month ago, one of my first posts asked the eternal question, "What punster came up with the name Parkade?"

It turns out that hard-hitting questions like that shine a light into a corner of the dark underbelly that is commercial real estate in this town. And it's not a pretty underbelly, either.

It turns out nobody will answer. Nobody will cop to meaning to call it that. And it was never really the "Parkade", anyway. Was just a placeholder that was only marginally more or less thoughtless than "The Old K-Mart Plaza".

It was matters such as this that apparently led the mayor to ask the Transcript to stop referring to it as such, as Wednesday's revealing editorial revealed. On a day when there were apparently no other stories on which to offer an editorial opinion, we are challenged to come with yet another name for our new retail bonanzaplex by Glenn Drohan and the gang.

I mean, I like the idea, but after having taken part in one too many band naming sessions and with a wife who's in Advertising Executives Anonymous, this is a surefire ticket to packing the kids in the minivan and heading for the "Shops On Ashland", "Northern Berkshire Retail Orgy", or "North Adams Entertainmentapalooza".

It's probably going to be another 15 years before people stop calling it the K-Mart Plaza anyway, so let's come up with something truly forward-thinking. Why don't we sell naming rights? To, like, K-Mart? They wouldn't actually have to open a store, but they could pay us a few dozen grand a year to call it "The K-Mart Plaza". How great would that be, getting paid to do something we all already do? It'd be like getting a check every time you picked your nose or took two pennies out of the "take one, leave one" saucer. Sign me up, dude.

So send your suggestions to Glenn at the the Transcript, and make North Adams proud. We can name stuff better than those cheese-eating pansies down in Pittsfield any day of the week, right? Huh? Who's with me? Ready, BREAK!

A Tale Of Two Parties

2006-11-08T00:14:00.000-05:00

Politics is sports for the non-jocks.

You got your winners and losers, most importantly. There's scoring, statistics, strategy. A rule book. The media. Superstars, comeback stories, and dirty tricks. And each Tuesday after the first Monday in November: the championships. Everything but cheerleaders, really. And much like sports, there's watching it, which is a perfectly valid level of involement...and then there is participating in it.

The absolute best thing about working on political campaigns is the people you meet during them. Yeah, good governance is nice, and hooray for the good guys (whoever they are, these days). But when we work together with a bunch of people we'd never normally have met, and fight the good fight for a common cause above ourselves, then win or lose, our acquaintances become our friends. And we have made many friends.

And the best thing about friends...is parties!

Say what you want about Dion Robbins-Zust. His candidacy was what it was, but he's actually a very engaging guy, and arguably is in a position to be a voice for the Berkshire County progressive movement. Anyway, at one of our conversations during the campaign, he invited Tara and I to his election night party. Sounds like fun, right? Well, it did to us too, so we went. And we had a great time. There were fireworks, and champagne, and towards 9:00 or so I was jamming on the trap kit with a bad-ass mandolin player (Don, who has a gig at the The Lion's Den down in Stockbridge), plus keys, digeridoo, bongos, and vocals. Not a single person was wearing a tie, and everyone was laughing and smiling and having a terrific time.

Shortly after, Dion wanted to go up to the ITAM in Pittsfield and congratulate Ben Downing on his win (as did we) in person. It's on our way back up north, so we stopped in to that party too.

There weren't any fireworks, and no digeridoo player, but there was champagne. About 2/3 of the guys there wearing ties, and everyone was laughing and smiling and having a terrific time. Great night for the Democrats. And really a lot of fun to have been present the night they smashed the champagne bottle on Ben Downing's political battleship.

But Ben and Dion spoke to each other and shook each other's hand and I'm sure congratulated each other on a well-run campaign. Then I asked if I could take a picture of the two guys, and don't think for a second I'm not going to post it here:

So that's about it for the actual election. Glad to see Tom Merrigan win one for the good guys on the Governor's Council. Question 4 is a resounding Yes, for whatever that's worth, and I'm noticing that almost all of the towns that voted Yes on Question 1 were wealthy suburbs: it carried in Lincoln, Wellesley, Weston, Brookline, and Cambridge. Wonder why.

Anyway, great Election Night! The shouting is over--let the blathering begin!

A Short Aside on the NY 20th Congressional Race

2006-11-06T10:24:00.000-05:00

I wanted to comment on the race for Congress we see coming out of Albany TV--the total debacle for the NY 20th District seat being staged by Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand and incumbent Republican John Sweeney.

Both of them should be ashamed. If I lived over the border in Columbia County I wouldn't vote for either one of 'em. If there's a grain of truth in either of the campaigns they're running, they're both corrupt, incompetent, and out for personal gain instead of the interest of the people of eastern New York. Gillibrand wants to shred my money in a shredder and Sweeney wants to take my money and spend it on booze and broads.

The ads have degenerated into schoolyard taunts of "Liar, liar, pants on fire" and "Nyah, nyah". Sweeney has his wife in one ad baiting Gillibrand; Gillibrand counters with calling him one of the 20 most corrupt Congressmen. The DCCC and RCCC are getting their chops in as well, but the "I approve this ad" ads right from the campaigns are the worst of the lot.

It ain't my district, but the winner goes to my U.S. Congress, so I get to care, and here's my thought: they've both simultaneously succeeded in painting the other as unworthy for the office. So not only does one candidate lose, so do the several hundred thousands of residents of New York State. Good job, guys. This is why people hate politicians.

Good Senate Hunting

2006-11-03T18:46:00.000-05:00

I grew up here in the Commonwealth in what is now the 2nd Essex Senatorial district, whose seat has been held for the last 40 million years or so by current Senate Majority Leader Fred Berry. He not only has been a stalwart for his party and his district, but also, to his credit, wouldn't know me from a hole in the ground.

But now that I have wound my way west and gotten more involved in the process, I can say that I will be personally acquainted and have held face-to-face discussions with my next State Senator. Want proof? I took this picture at a Rotary Club event a couple weeks ago:

Here holding the shiny blue Rotary mugs that inspire politicians everywhere, we have, L-R, Ben Downing (D-Pittsfield), Matt Kinnaman (R-Lenox), and Dion Robbins-Zust (I-Richmond). One of them is off to Beacon Hill to represent me and 152,299 of my closest friends.

The post-primary campaign has been a remarkably chummy affair. There have been more hairline jokes from Ben and Matt (the title of this post...get it now?) than in any other political campaign I've ever followed. There's been no October surprise, dirty campaign ads, "Macaca" moments, mailer meddling, or resume puffery. Keep in mind, now, that without a great resume puffery story back in September, there would be absolutely no hairline jokes in this campaign. So special thanks to Chris Hodgkins, who could have run away with it had he not orally Photoshopped himself next to Donald Trump and Warren Buffett.

Eventually, though, most elections are less about hair than about votes. Who to vote for?

Dion is a character. An original. He has an eye for The Show, which really comes in handy in the Politisphere. Not a policy wonk, nor a politics-as-usual guy. But he's probably going to poll the typical 6 or so percent next Tuesday. Not that I'm saying "don't vote for him", but it is not yet the time for the Green/Rainbow Party to ride the historical tide of backlash against the 2-party system into statewide office.

I bet his election night party is going to more fun than the other two, though.

Matt Kinnaman presented us with a challenge. Before the primary, Tara and I both were prepared to cross the line rather than vote for Chris Hodgkins. So we looked at his positions, and we listened to him speak. And we liked him, although it was hard to really believe that a vote for him would "restore balance" to the Legislature. But since he sounded enough like a Weldian/Patakian/Bloombergian liberal Republican with moderate tendencies, I could have been OK with him as one of Our Men In Boston...right up until I asked him about his position on choice.

My question to him was designed to get a straight-up answer: "Given the leanings of our Federal Government and our increasingly conservative Supreme Court, pretend Roe v. Wade is overturned and the issue is put before the states. A bill is before you to outlaw all voluntary terminations of pregnancy except where the life of the mother is endangered. Do you vote for it?"

He first tried to deflect the issue to parental notification, then I picked out three phrasings of a fairly long paragraph of a response that seemed to reveal his stance: "I respect the sanctity of life", "it would be hard for me to vote against my conscience", and "I'm still wrestling with the issue." A man says that instead of "yes" or "no", then I'm going to have a hard time switching parties to vote for him. It's less about the content of the answer than the format, in this case, to be honest, especially when the other guys answer is an unhesitating "No way, dude."

That brings us to Ben Downing. Back in August, I wrote a Letter to the Editor suggesting Margie Ware was the best qualified Democrat in the primary. In it, I questioned Ben Downing's motivations for running, writing that I thought he was only using the seat as a launching pad to a larger political career.

I hadn't actually met Ben at that point; I was using the power of persuasive penmanship to rally support for my candidate...although I did mention that I liked him. I heard him at a few more debates, watched him behave admirably during the campaign, and realized that as valid as my objection is, it doesn't mean he's not going to be an effective legislator for the years that he does actually hold the office.

So, a few days before the primary (I think on the day Mayor Barrett endorsed Chris Hodgkins), Tara and I were kicking it over at Ware HQ on Main St when we saw Ben head into the Cup and Saucer. I followed him in and introduced myself, and told him that if Marge doesn't win the primary, that I'd be proud to support him. I meant it, too. And I'll say it, for what it's worth: I'm going to vote for Ben Downing on Tuesday, and I think you should too.

Next up: the Governor's Council race. Your assignment for next week is to know more than the average Mass resident knows about the Governor's Council. Expected time to accomplish this: 26 seconds.

Congratulations to Governor Patrick

2006-10-30T14:37:00.000-05:00

He's up 25 points over Kerry Healey, has the endorsement of virtually every paper in the commonwealth, and has come through the reprehensible campaign run by the Lt. Governor and the Mass GOP with only a few scratches and bruises.

Meanwhile, he's run a decent campaign, focused on the positives, and watched the good citizens of the Bay State reject a campaign that used spurious character assassination as a way to divert attention away from a non-existent legislative record. Another blonde harpy in a twinset with a fetish for negative ads bites it. Let's hear it for Truth And Justice!

So what would a Patrick administration mean for us out here in the far-western frontier?

His support of the Cape Wind project may help streamline the wind project up on Florida Mountain. Like it or not, it appears the citizens of Florida, Savoy, Rowe, and Monroe are OK with it there, for the right reasons. It's good money for these folks: the developers are going to pay good commercial rate taxes on the land. There'll be some infrastructure improvements. And yes, there's a green energy, hippie-dippie component to the project that, while perhaps negligible in the great big scheme of things, is heading in the right direction.

Some local folks may end up in the Administration, giving them a chance to make a big statewide splash. Mr. Patrick has some well-qualified long-time supporters out in this part of the jungle, and hooray for patronage. Just try not to forget us little people when you head out to the big city. I recommend the Harvard Gardens, on Cambridge St. outside Charles Circle, for a quick drink and bite close to the State House.

Will our "taxes" go up? Hard to say. It's a bit of a politician's argument rather than actual dollar-based real world accounting. We pay all kinds of dough to all levels of government in sorts of forms. Property, income, sales, meals, excise taxes. RMV fees. Hunting and fishing and dog licenses. Professional licensures. Even the extra money they want to take wood to the dump (but that's another post entirely). Who's to say our taxes have gone down if we pay $30 less per year in property taxes but an extra $65 to register our car? Or if your income tax rate goes down to 5.1875% while it costs an extra $25 to renew your pipefitter ticket? Before anyone can realistically say "he's going to raise our taxes", keep in mind that no politician has really ever reduced the "size" of government to any appreciable degree, and somebody's gotta pay for it.

We may actually see some folks getting health care that need but can't afford it. Anyone can jiggle the numbers and talk about the $295 fine for not insuring workers and make it sound like politics, but the real issue is far more complicated. The basic philosophy of the Patrick administration seems to be "let's do what we can to help these folks", where the Romney attitude seems to have been "poor people should just shut up, get real jobs, and stop dragging down the economy by not wanting to die."

At least that's my take on it.

But it's all theoretical, and now as always, most of our lives change very little based on who's holding some political office somewhere. The translation into legislation of the conservative attitude of government as a burden vs. the liberal attitude of government as a facilitator is what I'll be using as my barometer to measure the change in the political weather come next year. Electing Mr. Patrick could turn out to be the best thing Massachusettts has ever done, or it could be a high-priced ticket to insolvency. Neither extreme is likely, but at the very least, the change in the atmosphere is something to look forward to.

Questions That Really Matter

2006-10-27T20:06:00.000-04:00

I've spent three days trying to come up with something to write 500 words about that didn't include the words "basher" or "Buddington" in it. I hope Eric and everybody who's bashed anybody in the last two weeks will appreciate this.

In that spirit, I'm holding a referendum on the important stuff. We need to get the opinions of the community-at-large on the TRUE quality-of-life issues. So, let's vote, on the first Northern Berkshire Blogosphere Survey On The Questions That Really Matter. We'll start slow, and see if anybody really gives a crap enough to continue.

Best Coffee Shop (points for or against weirdo drinks, food, ambiance, as you wish):
- Brew Ha Ha
- Cup & Saucer
- Dunkin' Donuts
- Tunnel City Coffee
Best Angioplasty On A Plate For $10 or Less:
- China Buffet
- Hot Dog Ranch
- Jack's
- Oriental Buffet
- Pedrin's
Best Quick Nine Holes:
- Forest Park
- North Adams CC
- Stamford Valley
Best Food-Based Fundraising Event To Attend:
- Ice Cream Social
- Pancake Breakfast
- Regular Breakfast
- Spaghetti Supper
I can't resist a political one to rouse the rabble. OK, two:
Most Annnoying Left-Wing Public Personality (Control yourselves, now. No write-ins):
- Hillary Clinton
- Howard Dean
- Michael Moore
- Cindy Sheehan
- Barbra Streisand
Most Annnoying Right-Wing Public Personality (Tough as it may be, vote for only one):
- George W Bush
- Dick Cheney
- Ann Coulter
- Karl Rove
- Donald Rumsfeld

So vote, if you'd like, on any or all of these categories by leaving a comment or emailing. And if you have any suggestions on additions to the library of Questions That Really Matter (I'm allowing anonymous comments on this post for a few days), let me know!

And, Well, That Was That

2006-10-24T20:01:00.000-04:00

It was all over in 20 minutes. In the end, everything of relevance was said long before the action kicked off at the City Council meeting on Tuesday night.

The only person who got gavel-banged by Council President Cariddi was an older dude who took his time to thank the Council for "not allowing these people" (and here I'd assume he's talking about people who want to impeach the President) "to spread their hatred". I was half expecting him to tell those dirty hippies to get off his lawn, from the tone of it.

It took longer for them to take roll call and pledge allegiance than to get through the agenda and into Concerns, where Councilor Bloom disabused any "Bush haters" present of the idea of abusing the "right" of open forum (which he later backtracked to a "privilege"). His argument: if we begin opening up the scope of open forum to allow national and international political issues, he asked, "where will it end"?

Ah, the old slippery slope. I'll leave it to the reader to perform their own analysis of that rhetorical technique at the Wikipedia entry for it.

Then the curtain went up on open forum, and the proverbial little child led them. Young Max May read a very short statement saying that he thinks the President should be impeached. He was gone in less time than it takes Jon Lovitz to emote a sandwich ad.

Then a feisty senior named Rosemarie told the City Council that she signed the Buddington/May petition and that she "doesn't think it's fair to have a president that doesnt care about the small people." Earnest, fair, and yet wildly off base. She lost me when it sounded like she was blaming George W. Bush for the churches in town having to close. Wow. We're talking about a man who can be accused of a lot of wacky things, most assuredly, but come on. He's not Satan*.

Then Mr. "I Hate Haters" from the second paragraph gave his impassioned summary of the Standard Right Wing Defense of Administration Policy™, and it was over. The end. Twenty minutes of glorious local cable television.

My initial takeaways on the whole affair:

The two agenda items were disposed of in five minutes and the correspondence in two. If nobody were there for open forum, the whole meeting would have been done in less time than it takes me to finish a cup of coffee. This is the time that the Council is so zealously protecting? I know some meetings run long, but it really didn't seem like there was a whole lot else going on tonight. Ten minutes of debate on President Bush would have at least made it worth the gas to drive downtown.
The Council really missed an opportunity to come off as champions of free speech by putting the resolution up for debate. Instead, they stood firm as guardians of the City's agenda in the face of an unpopular political statement. Fair enough, but you could have gotten style points for the grace to let everybody have their say.
Having said that, the Council exercised good judgment in holding open forum and showed no evidence that they would not have allowed Dr. May or Mr. Buddington to speak. No taser guns were fired. And the riot helmets stayed...um, wherever they keep the riot helmets.
I was surprised that neither Eric nor Peter did speak, though. I invite either gentleman to leave a comment here explaining the thought process behind the strategy they executed at the meeting. Were they pulling their punches, or was something else going on?

In the end, l'Affaire May/Buddington did rouse the public to engage in a good old-fashioned political debate. Turns out that only some of it was the debate about impeachment. The rest, thanks to the Law of Unintended Consequences, was about the state of Participatory Democracy here on Main Street, USA, 2006. Still pretty ugly, but should live to carry on another day.

* Probably.

Where's The Voice Of Reason?

2006-10-23T14:25:00.000-04:00

The tone of the debate about the May/Buddington City Council Resolution is turning decidedly nasty. Unnecessarily so, in my opinion.

As a former senator from Massachusetts and fellow graduate of my alma mater wrote some years ago:

"With respect to the war in which we are now involved, the course which our principles require us to pursue cannot be doubtful. It is now the law of the land, and as such we are bound to regard it. Resistance and insurrection form no part of our creed. The disciples of Washington are neither tyrants in power nor rebels out. If we are taxed to carry on this war we shall disregard certain distinguished examples and shall pay. If our personal services are required we shall yield them to the precise extent of our constitutional liability.

At the same time the world may be assured that we know our rights and shall exercise them. We shall express our opinions on this, as on every measure of the government,--I trust without passion, I am certain without fear. By the exercise of our constitutional right of suffrage, by the peaceable remedy of election, we shall seek to restore wisdom to our councils, and peace to our country.(emphasis added)"

If this isn't the most eloquent plea for reason that I've read this week, I don't know what is.

There are voices on both sides that seem to think that volume wins, and the more slander one can heap upon their opponents and their motivations, the more merit that gives their arguments. There's no attempt on the right to see the frustration on the left; no attempt on the left to see the apprehension on the right. Instead, we get simultaneously more shrill and more smug and appeals to reason get thrown into the dumpster.

Polarization has led to near-total stagnation of the national electorate. Nothing gets done except by executive fiat, which half the country hits the roof over while the other half gets all defensive. Pretty soon the debate becomes as much about the debate as it does about the issue (hello! this post!); trenches are dug, and minds refuse to change.

Some may argue it has been ever thus; Andy Etman has been posting quotes from the past that illustrate the sameness of the political rhetoric throughout history. True as that may be, ponder this: is that the most effective way to run a nation? Does making 50.1% of the populace happy constitute a worthy goal? Can't we do better?

For what it's worth, my only relevant observation on the actual issue at hand borders on the completely facetious: If the Council had decided to introduce the resolution, debate it for 10 minutes, and give it a straight up/down vote, wouldn't that have taken less of everyone's time than denying the agenda spot for the resolution and having to debate about that? If the argument is that the Council's time is too valuable for this sort of thing, then why waste everyone's time doing it the way it's being done now?

And if the argument is that the impeachment resolution goes against what our elected representatives believe their constituency wants, then why not just put it to a vote and defeat it?

What Mr. Webster said in July of 1812 is incredibly true today. The electorate will have its say. But contrary to what Mr. Hotaling's letter suggests, it can only act retroactively. We'll see if there's any fallout from this issue come November 6, 2007.

This Is What the Media Cares About?

2006-10-20T15:54:00.000-04:00

Tara and I were working downstairs with the TV on in the background when we saw a familiar face flash across the screen. Thank God for TiVo, or we'd have missed this entirely.

Channel 6 in Albany teased tonight's newscast with the "Dion's changing his name to Kennedy" story that Jack Dew of the Eagle had published last week. And they did it with that grating little vocal smirk that news anchors are really good at--the same one that they use to tell stories that end with "Fortunately, no one was injured."

This is probably the only non-local access TV coverage the Berkshire, Hampshire, and Franklin state senate race is going to get apart from the micro-scroll across the bottom of the screen on the Boston stations come Nov. 7th. Is our seat that pointless that the only time anyone even notices is during the publicity stunts? Should I even be glad that they even pay attention to THOSE?

Perspective is everything when it comes to a lot of things, and politics isn't usually one of those things. But say for a second we tried to apply some perspective to this situation. There are forty senators in the General Court, and our conservative administration would like nothing better than to see control of major issues stripped from [Clinton-era liberal activist] federal judges right back to the states (except for equal marriage, for which they want to amend the Constitution, but that's another post entirely). This means that if the federal government washes its hands of some very pressing cultural and political legislation, the determination of how we live our lives here could very well be placed in the hands of forty senators--one for each 153,000 residents. The rights we have regarding abortion, flag burning, gambling, gun ownership, marriage, civil rights, telecommunications--all hot-button issues currently in federal stewardship--could rest on the shoulders of a bunch of people in Boston who get virtually no non-biased press before they go off to vote on what we can or can't do without getting thrown in jail.

Does it seem unimportant now?

This election is getting less coverage in both Boston and Albany than, for instance, Deion Branch signing with the Seahawks. Not just at this level, either. The only serious coverage the Governor's race is getting concerns the negative media advertising. You couldn't even watch a lot of the Governor's debates in Berkshire County! EVEN on local access!

It's a common trick for politicians to blame the media for personal shortcomings. But the media is doing such a terrible job keeping the public informed and involved that it's just shameful. It wouldn't even be so bad if they just ignored the entire thing completely, so long as they didn't just focus on the non-issues that confuse and cloud the real importance of the process.

And there's no solution in sight apart from getting involved personally. And that goes to hell as soon as the new fall episodes of the TV shows start up. No excuse now, though--another reason to thank God for TiVo.

A Field Guide To The American Republican

2006-10-19T01:15:00.000-04:00

Republicans (Homo Phobius Americanus) are found all throughout the continental United States, with particular concentrations in the South and Midwest. Good places for spotting many breeds in their natural habitat include stock car races, Christian rock band concerts, and Branson, Missouri. However, as a public service, here's a quick guide to help you identify each major subtype of GOP'er:

The Top-Hatted Unionbuster: made infamous by their portrayal in Soviet propaganda cartoons of the 1920's, this breed is convinced that any American of any stripe can become the next Railroad Tycoon with a little gumption and elbow grease provided the damn government and its meddling minimum wage and labor laws can stay out of their way. These folks are found in suits and suites around the country, issuing their shrill call: "Out-SOURCE! OUT-source! Cheeeeep cheeep cheeeep labor!" They are often found alongside:
The Ferrari'd Trustfundie: named after a famous type of roadster in which they frequently mate, this smugger-than-average breed often matures from rambunctious campus hippie-hating journalism majors into careers in The Family Business, Law, Elective Office, Teaching Grad Students Once a Week, or Giving Speeches.
The Hardblowing Windbag: There are actually three Windbag subspecies:
- The Disembodied Voice, found on or slightly to the right of the radio dial. This breed will take your calls, make fun of you, and hang up unless you agree with absolutely everything they say.
- The Talking Head. These folks are almost all related to one of the original Imported Australian Windbags, easily seen on basic cable and known to write books that remind one of the final Windbag subspecies:
- The Shrill Author, who makes more noise in the pages of a book, newspaper, or vanity blog than most people make after stubbing their toe. These Windbags have transformed their call over the past few years from "Commies! Aaah! Commies!" to "Liberals! Aaah! Liberals!".
The Paranoid Guntoter: This mainly reclusive species is obsessed with the idea that Democrats will come marching into their homes and rip their stash of AK-47s away from their cold dead hands. Heavily armed, lightly glued, and giving off a distinctive aroma of gunpowder, this breed teaches their chicks to "shoot to kill" from an early age. Often located in deer stands, base housing, underground bunkers, near Charlton Heston movies, and the Vice President's office.
O'Reilly's Miffed Culturewarrior: this breed is easily recognized as it has only two vocalizations: either a muttered disgust or a shrill tirade. If you hear one muttering disgust, you can intiate a change to the shrill tirade by turning the conversation to gay marriage, immigration, Hollywood liberals, Air America Radio, or Bill Clinton. Shows a fanatical devotion to the Hardblowing Windbag.
The Crossed Lordpraiser: Showing a much wider distribution over the last dozen or so years, this breed nests in churches and can't understand why some other breeds want to separate church and nest, especially since they think (incorrectly, according to the Tweed-Elbowed Democrats) that the country was founded by Lordpraisers like them. Really plans on showing other breeds what's what by being snatched out of thin air leaving all others to suffer years of tribulation. Has much in common with the Culturewarrior but is much more inclined to be OK with a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Iran, hastening the End Times.

There are rumors of sightings of the Vanishing Easternus Liberalus, mostly in New York State and even here in Western New England. Forced to adapt to a hostile climate, this breed usually only differentiates itself from Democrats during election years, and is pretty much considered traitorous and untouchable by the other breeds. It is rare and probably a pretender to major office, except perhaps as Secretary of State.

Every once in a while, there is a single specimen that rises above all others and can work well with and reflect the viewpoints of all breeds of American. This one lone Republican has an innate instinct for what's fair, what's right, and how to get people to agree and work together towards a common goal. Usually, however, this specimen is beaten down and urinated upon by every other Republican and only comes out at night, in the dark, chased into madness by the noise, greed, lust for power, and irrationality of the entire process.

Are We As Dumb As We Look?

2006-10-17T19:22:00.000-04:00

So, this company that I'd never heard of, Morgan Quitno Press, has come out with another one of those potentially hugely bogus study results--one that seems to exist solely to give news editors, debate teams, and bloggers something to talk about.

In this one, they rank Vermont as the "smartest" state in the union, with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts--now to be deemed "The Silver Medal State" thanks to both this and Nancy Kerrigan's semi-heroic skating--as number two. Vermont repeats as #1 from last year while we geniuses here popped up 1 place, forcing those dumbasses in Connecticut down to #3.

I know you're interested in who hit dead last. I certainly was. It's Arizona, as it turns out, followed by Nevada, Mississippi, and California. The Southwestern Trifecta, with a kicker. The punchlines here are easy pickin's.

But this is not why I bring this study up.

Dumb as it may be to play into this, let's do it as a thought exercise. Let's say a bunch of guys from Kansas (#15) determine Massachusetts is somehow 2.5 points dumber than Vermont, 12.4 points smarter than New York, and second out of all fifty states based on graduation rates, test scores, knowledge of Star Trek, whatever. What's it mean?

Most obviously and importantly, it means that the teachers, school committees, PTAs, administrators, paraprofessionals, staffs, parents, and of course, the kids are doing what they all need to be doing, sometimes under incredibly difficult conditions and on shoestring budgets.

It means that people come here for the excellence of our school systems, public and private; early, secondary and higher. People come to Massachusetts to go to Andover, Miss Hall's, and Deerfield. For Simon's Rock and Williams. For Harvard, MIT, Tufts, BC, BU, Northeastern, Holy Cross, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Hampshire, Amherst, UMass, Clark, WPI. And people stay once they've been here.

It means that state and local government has been able to accomodate business that attracts and retains educated professionals without driving them out of state to New Hampshire or North Carolina.

Regardless of how true or not the results of this sound bite study actually are, there will always be candidates, columnists, pundits, salesmen, and loudmouths. And their worlds will always be troubled; there will naught but evil to be fought and challenges to be overcome. And in a troubled world, you can turn to--well, whatever candidate, idea, or product they're suggesting will make everything shiny, safe, and easy.

Don't believe all of it, though. Believe instead for a few minutes that committed people, working together, can educate our kids, keep our stuff and our families secure, and make things better for everyone. Maybe not perfect, and not always shiny, safe, or easy. But always trying harder, working smarter, and realizing the ultimate lesson from Star Trek: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

It's either that, or rerouting the warp core phase flucuations through the tractor beam will reverse antimatter inversions and repair rifts in space-time. I think it's the "needs of the many" thing, though.

Las Vegas On $5 A Day

2006-10-16T22:34:00.000-04:00

...would probably be one sucky trip. But Tara and I have just set up a quick December vacation, as we have only been out of town a couple times this year, to good old Vegas. This time we're staying at The Riviera; it's my eighth trip to a Vegas hotel in the last 13 years, and for some reason I've never stayed in the same place twice.

I first went in November '93, on a business trip to do a song-and-dance about our company's time and billing software at a big trade show. Stayed at the Barbary Coast. Shared a room with mensch Pete Blum (hi Pete--bet you'll NEVER read this!); this was obviously before the tech boom. Had some fun with Tracey (hi Tracey--bet YOU'LL never read this either) and Julie (hi Jul--aw, you get the point) and some other folks who, thinking about it now, were really good friends whom I miss more than I thought I would by now. The Barbary Coast was a total hole, by the way. Even back then.

Went back in December '96, alone, and stayed downtown at the Golden Nugget. Back again in '98, also alone, at the Excalibur. Again in October 2000, to meet Paul (the kicked-out-of-Middleton guy I talked about in the countertop post a couple days ago) and Seanie "Bugbite" Ennis for a boy's weekend. We stayed at the now-long-gone Boardwalk, all 3 of us in one room. We all smoked at the time. Must have smelled like the bottom of a sumo wrestler's laundry basket in that room by the time we left.

First time with Tara in April '01, at Caesar's Palace. Big hot tub in the room...bow chicka chicka bow wow. Ahem. Then in '02 with her and her brother Dru at the Frontier. TRULY the grubbiest digs in town. And the staff had their ass-sticks firmly in place for that trip. And finally, October '03 found us at the Venetian during our big West Coast roadtrip. The night before that we had stayed in the bustling metropolis of Tonopah, Nevada. Wonderfully lame little place, which made it all the more run-down Old West charming. Makes North Adams seem like Amsterdam in comparison.

So given all that experience, here are my top things to do in Vegas:

For gambling, I like the 25-cent multi-game video machines that play blackjack. I have good luck at them, and they'll come by with the free drinks. Play a buck a hand and you can sit there gambling for real money for two, three hours at a time. Beats having to play at a $15 table next to a creepy Japanese grandmother with switchblade fingernails and a permanent scowl.
Eat. Goes without saying. The In-and-Out Burger is a seldom-visited treat. Gone, though, are the days they used to give away food to get you into the casino. Still may be some places downtown, but on the Strip, they can get away without the low-cost steam table leftovers.
The Star Trek Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton. Seriously, this is worth the cab ride, and Quark's Bar is a fun place to meet for a drink.
The Sports Book. Believe it or not, a futures ticket is a great present for the sports fan on your list. Get your brother-in-law a $25 ticket for the Patriots to win the '07 Super Bowl. If they lose, eh, it's a cute memento; but if they do win, how much cooler would that make it? I'll tell you: $200 cooler! Especially if he actually IS a Patriots fan!
Tara loves the roller coaster at New York, New York. It is kinda cool, but take a lesson from The Cool Kid here and take some Dramamine first, or you'll give a whole new meaning to visiting Ralph out in Coney Island.

So let me know if you'll be out there at the same time...we'll meet up at Quark's Bar and shoot some craps. It'll be fun!

Counter(top) Punching

2006-10-13T17:21:00.000-04:00

We have learned more about countertops in the six months between February and September than we had ever bargained for. It never seemed to us that buying a flat slab of something to spill coffee on would be that complicated. Some of the biggest idiots we know have countertops. How tough could this be?

We made it tougher on ourselves by getting a great deal on an apron-front, undermount sink. We got that sink, which Tara had her eye on before we even signed the papers on the house, from Overstock.com for about 1/5 the retail price. It was like, "I don't care about electrical service or water in the basement. I want a FARM SINK!" So a farm sink it was. And after we did the cabinets, here's what we were looking at for our own little hunk of kitchen work surface glory:

But as we were designing the new kitchen, our first round of research brought us to the Vince Lombardi Rest Stop on the Conventional Wisdom of Kitchen Remodeling Highway: Thou shalt not create a laminate countertop for thy undermount sink, lest ye swell up and part from thy substrate; it is an abomination."

I'm like...come on. They've put a man on the moon. Solved Fermat's Last Theorem. The Red Sox won the World Series. You mean I have to drop $1200 on seventeen square feet of solid-surface countertop because modern science can't create a waterproof seam between a 1/16" sheet of laminate and a piece of friggin wood?

But nobody would do it for us. It was like asking them to make it out of kitten fur and baby seal eyes. I could swear I heard one guy laughing at us. AFTER he'd hung up the phone.

So--our alternatives:

Stop pissing and moaning and pay the money for Corian, granite, marble, poured concrete or glass.
Pay even MORE money for a "green" solution like Richlite, Avonite, or shredded $20 bills. Which we'd have to provide, from the estimates of it.
Stainless steel over particleboard. An interesting idea. But around here, it was hard to find a supplier to come in cheap, especially with the bends and corners in our countertop.
I know you're losing interest rapidly, but bear with me.
Tile. An option, as we could have cement backerboard on the bottom. Waterproof, but we couldn't figure out how to do the rim around the sink. Plus, nobody likes an uneven surface.
Kitten fur and baby seal eyes. Believe me, I thought about it.
Do my OWN laminate countertop. We went a long way down the road with this plan. We were gonna screw together two sheets of 5/8" exterior plywood, waterproof them, cut the template out with my widdle jigsaw, laminate all the surfaces and mount the thing. Problem 1: I have no idea how to do any of that. Problem 2: I think when I ran that by a few people they laughed even harder than the first guy I talked to. Back to square 1.

So one day I read about some stuff called Trespa Athlon, made by a Dutch company, made of some weird resin. Hmmm...good idea. Resin, you say?

Well, we couldn't actually get a hold of anyone at Trespa, but Tara got on her horse, ran with the ball, and found Lab Furniture, in Middleton, Massachusetts, a town near and dear to my heart after my friends Paul and Dave were caught drinking underage there back in 1986. They were expelled from Middleton permanently. Told NEVER to return. Ever. I don't know about Dave, but Paul sneaked back in with me around 2000, and I swear the cops raised an eyebrow at him when we drove past the Dunkin' Donuts.

Back to the story: we called Mike at Lab Furniture, sent him our template, and he came back with Prime Epoxy Resin. This is the stuff they used to make your high school chemistry lab work surface. Impervious to water, chemicals, frog guts, or my homemade macaroni and cheese. Black, 1" thick, can be cut and machined, and came in handy 4'x8' sheets. Squint, and you can see our design was exactly 96" wide. Our only spot of luck in the whole process.

The best part? We paid about $500 for the piece, plus a 4" backsplash all around, and another $150 to ship it from the factory in Michigan. Took about three weeks, we got it in, and it slid right on like a big black epoxy resin slipper. Thanks, Mike!

Anyway, if you're still reading this, know that if you're in the market for a solid surface countertop, you don't have to pay upwards of $70 a square foot. As long as you want it black. With a 1/8" beveled edge. But hey, why don't more people know about this stuff? And why the hell do people charge so much for countertops?

Next up: the plumbing. Lookin' forward to THAT.

Vote From Your Consciousness

2006-10-12T14:25:00.000-04:00

The title of this post was a great line delivered by Dion (rhymes with Lion) Robbins-Zust, at the State Senate debate sponsored by the Mass. Commission on the Status of Women last night in Pittsfield. He probably meant 'conscience', but I like it that way. Much more zen. Better political feng shui.

The debate was a timed, moderated format featuring Mr. Zust (officially Independent, but with a Green/Rainbow party affiliation) against Republican Matthew Kinnaman and Democrat Ben Downing, and moderated by Florida Town Administrator Susan Brown. There were about 50 folks in attendance, with the Downing supporters seated on the left side of the room, and the Kinnaman boosters on the right. Talk about feng shui.

Tara and I, being neither professional reporters nor particularly punctual, missed the first ten minutes of the show. I have notes on the rest, but think I'll just convey some of my general impressions about the debate and the campaign so far.

The whole affair seemed pretty chummy, as these things go. The Democratic primary debates were more rough-and-tumble than this one. Not that I was expecting a fistfight to break out (as much fun as THAT would be to write about), but there was a whole bunch of mutual agreement and stating positive positions on issues. Besides, Ben is giving away at least 3 inches and 25 pounds to Matt, so I think he'd lose in a fight between the two of them.

They discussed teen pregnancy, wind power, the role of arts in the economy, health insurance, the Community Preservation Act, the Berkshire Compact, and the availability of hi-speed internet. Ben and Matt talked a lot about education as economic stimulus and societal remedy. Dion talked a lot about shared parenting legislation. I mean, a lot. In response to Sue's questions about teen pregnancy, unfilled jobs, the Community Preservation Act, and even hi-speed internet access, he was able to work shared parenting legislation in there as a response. And...the Japanese. He was referring to the intense family culture that influences their society, and how it would benefit life here, but a) I don't see how a freshman state senator does much about that legislatively and b) if he continues that debating style, he's in danger of being labeled a single-issue candidate. His web site has a more comprehensive list of his positions, but during the debate yesterday, he really nailed that message. With big nails. And a big hammer.

We should be able to predict the tone of the final act now. Fortunately, it looks like none of the candidates will go negative. That's refreshing, although it's less compelling blogging. Matt will be using the word "experience" a lot, trying to subtly ram the age issue through to the voters, and stressing his career in education. Ben will continue the strategy that won him the primary: family history, experience working with legislators; youth and passion, and technology. Dion will probably work in a few more references to shared parenting legislation and spread the message that neither the Dems nor Repubs are providing anything but "hollow rhetoric" in lieu of actual responsible governance.

In short, I think Sue did a great job getting the issues out of all the candidates. I plan on bringing some additional, possibly more contentious issues up at the 10/24 W'town/North Adams Rotary Candidate's Event, and hopefully the 10/26 MCLA debate will feature some as well.

Keep in mind that all these guys are remarkably accessible (kudos!), so it's worth heading over to Dion's, Matt's, or Ben's web sites, and if you have a question or issue you'd like to raise with them, I predict you'll get a timely response.

If you're interested in my capsule summaries of each candidate's answers to the issue questions asked, let me know and I'll followup on this post. Or you can just watch the debate on TV. No commercials. I mean, that's cool.

What Do the Republicans Do, Drink Conservatively?

2006-10-10T22:54:00.000-04:00

...so asked a friend of a member of our monthly political, social, and ethanol-based discussion group, Drinking Liberally. North Adams has a chapter, founded by the very hard-working Executive Director of Northern Berkshire Creative Arts, Rebecca DeWitt. Tuesday was the third meeting of the group, which is turning into a real look-forward event for both me and Tara. Good to see both Marge Ware and Ben Downing there; Ben pointed out he co-founded the Tufts chapter of DL. He'd probably be the only State Senator to have THAT on his resume.

Ben's got a series of debates coming up against Republican Matt Kinnaman and Independent Dion Robbins-Zust this month: first is tonight (the 11th) at Girls Inc in Pittsfield and another one the 26th right here at MCLA in North Adams. Plus, plans are firming up for the candidates to address a joint lunch of the Williamstown and North Adams Rotary Clubs in Williamstown on Tuesday the 24th. That session may be open to the public--I'll let you know as soon as I find out.

So there's a story from the Drinking Liberally meeting. Those of us who read the Transcript's Letters to the Editor have read Peter May's October 5th entry, here in its entirety:

I pledge resistance to the flag
Of the United Corporations of America
And to the corrupt dictatorship
For which it stands,
One nation,
Under Bush divided,
With terror, inequality and injustice for all.
— United States of America, 1776-2006, R.I.P.

This triggered a snarky response from one citizen, which engendered a refreshing non-partisan shout-out from Transcript editor Glenn Drohan, and a rebuttal from Peter. This stuff makes great editorial, especially in an election year.

Anyway, Peter's got a version of the Declaration of Independence worded up as well. He's stirring up support for a visit to the next North Adams City Council meeting, where he and Eric Buddington are going to propose a Resolution For Impeachment, to call for the removal of the President and Vice Presidents of the United States as well as the Secretaries of State and Defense from office.

[Edited to add: The wording of the resolution has been updated: the proposal now calls for "encouraging the North Adams City Council to pass a resolution that calls on Representative Olver and Senators Kerry and Kennedy to impeach President George W. Bush and remove him from office."]

This'd be the evening of the 24th at City Hall. Should be a helluva show. If you're on Peter and Eric's side, they're looking for some help spreading the message, and at the very least to show up at the City Council meeting. You can get more information or sign up at Eric's web site. It's going to be something else, one way or the other. No doubt about it. If nothing else, the reaction to the proposal will be pretty enlightening, and if debate is allowed on the measure, it will be a good chance to hear the views of the city's elected officials.

See what you missed? Head over to the North Adams forum of the Drinking Liberally web site, or join their mailing list for info on November's meeting, which'll probably be the Tuesday AFTER election day. I'm sure there'll be lots to talk about.

CBGB NYC: RIP

2006-10-09T16:56:00.000-04:00

So, CBGB (not CBGB's, but that's what everyone called it) is finally closing, after 33 years in existence. RIP. You can read a great article in the NY Press on the subject written by my friend, band mate, and all-around class act Michael Cobb.

That band, The Crevulators, played there about a half-dozen times, down in the Downstairs Lounge and up on the main stage. Usually, the main stage appearances were on a bill supporting our friends The Reid Paley Trio:

It was cool to have trodden the same beer-soaked, carpet-covered plywood as the great NYC punk bands that are constantly mentioned in the same breath as CBGB: The Ramones, Talking Heads, and Blondie lead the medals podium there. They had a decent sound system and the Pabst Blue Ribbons were cold. But truth be told, it was past its prime by the time we got there. We usually had more fun and better crowds playing at either the Rodeo Bar across town or our more regular haunts in Brooklyn.

My guess is that most of the obits you're going to see about CBGB are going to be weepy nostalgia pieces that will almost invariably use the words "end of an era". Well, fine. Truth is, the place was a dump. It was a 10 minute walk in any direction to get either a slice of pizza or cup of coffee (an unforgiveable sin in Manhattan, really). Apart from the bands--most of which were Long Island, Westchester, and Jersey kids doing bad Green Day impressions--it was just a dark, spraypainted dive bar that was neither the first nor most impressive of its kind.

They never, as Tara pointed out to me, capitalized on their brand. How could someone not have paid Hilly Kristal ten thousand bucks 10 years ago, licensed the name, and opened up 5 or 10 places with memorabilia on the walls and $11 cheeseburgers? It'd have been a much cooler cachet than the Hard Rock or House of Blues. With instantaneous name recognition. Yeah, so it stripmallizes the cultural reference, but I stopped making myself upset about that sort of thing a few years ago. I'm picking my ideological battles much more carefully these days.

The closing of the place is as much about lack of vision as it is about any of the following influences that converged to sink the Kristal ship (ha! works in a classic rock reference!): NYC rents (rising), A-hole landlords (suing), original live music as an entertainment commodity (boring), and the passing into the Grey Havens of the bands that played there as kids (aging). It's just history, right? No need to start feeling old, or anything, right?

Biting the Ballot...Questions

2006-10-08T12:37:00.000-04:00

We have three intiative petitions to vote on here in the Commonwealth this year, all very much rooted out of the very base desires for money (2 of them) and power (the other one) by special interest groups.

Question 1: Should we be allowed to buy wine at supermarkets?

I'm like, sure, why not, whatever. I guess the guys at the local packies aren't going to be too happy, but I don't seem them going out of business over it. What gets me wanting to stab someone with a fork is the web site that the state supermarket PAC threw up advocating the question like it's about "choice for consumers" and updating "outdated provisions" in our state's liquor laws.

Wow. Thank you, Mass Food Association. Thank you for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to update our state's liquor laws. It's so...selfless of you. Hmmm, what? Your members stand to make millions of dollars over the next 10 years in wine sales? Really? Wow. I can't imagine that something so altruistic as wanting to provide choice for consumers would come with a side benefit that you're not mentioning in your marketing literature.

Question 2: Should we make ballots more confusing by sticking the same candidate in multiple times with a different and invariably weird fringe party designation?

I think you can tell where I come down on this. This particular web site is much better than the Supermarket Sweep folks sponsoring Q1 above, though. Has this great cartoon, which you can click to open the site:

We lived in the Empire State for a little more than three years, so I've seen this system in action. To date, the "Working Families Party" is still just the organization that has the Democratic candidate's name written on the ballot twice and gets the occasional column-inch in the Daily News. My problems with this initiative:

1) People are easily confused and as a rule tend not to make informed decisions anyway. This is just one more avenue to muddle things up without actually accomplishing anything.

2) As I'll expound in a later post, I'm incredibly tired of the two party system and the abject failure of either the GOP or Dems to rise above partisan hackery. I love the idea of a strong 3rd party. But having a bunch of guys named Moe band together to put someone else's party hack on the ballot under their name is just...I dunno...I can't decide between "silly" or "pointless". How about "spintless"?

I really would like me a can of vibrant democracy, though.

Question 3: Should home-based child care providers be able to collectively bargain with the Commonwealth?

Well, I don't have kids, and I don't take care of kids, so this all becomes more of theoretical question. Still, my vote counts just as much as other folks. I've always appreciated the contribution the labor movement has made to society, but...I think of the last 40 years of union activity like I do poetry: for every 1 single sublime, life-affirming poem, there are 300 that make me want to rip my eyeballs out. I was in NYC for 2 transit strikes--pointless. The MTA (the Mass Teachers--not the transit strike people) shutting down the longer school day here? Poorly played. So, when I see these folks wanting to band together, I get a vision of a bunch of families with no place to put their kids because their daycare provider is on strike* for an extra fifty bucks a week. I don't see how it makes the kids any better provided for, since you can't make the providers use any percentage of the gains made through collective bargaining to improve either their facilities or levels of service.

I do see the point. If the Commonwealth has a big say in your personal paycheck, it's good to have an advocacy with some teeth behind it. But it's not like this legislation will do for child care workers what Chavez did for farm workers. In the end, this is a vendor (the providers) to client (the commonwealth) relationship and it looks like the vendors are trying to set the conditions of the deal. Is that the way it's supposed to work?

So, that's it for that. Get out and vote!

*The proposed law does not grant the right to strike, but then again, NY law didn't authorize the last transit strike in NYC either. Roger Toussaint of the Transit Workers Union did 10 days in a bottom bunk at Rikers for that. Point is, just cuz somethin's illegal don't mean someone ain't gonna do it. I'm just sayin.

Hugh Laurie Plays One On TV

2006-10-07T22:54:00.000-04:00

I've really always liked Hugh Laurie. With Stephen Fry, Rowan Atkinson, or alone. In fact, "House" is probably the least interesting thing I've seen him in. I'm glad for his new US popularity, but it seems ironic that he gets it for playing an unlikeable character in one of the most formulaic medical shows ever with an American accent that I just can't get over.

Anyway, someone over on Fark.com posted this and I figured I'd test out a link to a YouTube video. Enjoy:

How's the Weather There in 1992?

2006-10-07T16:05:00.000-04:00

How come North Adams doesn't have a good city web site yet? One with FAQs about city government, ordinances, taxes, neighborhood and place names and maps, building codes, fire and police regs, parking, school info, snow emergency news, election information, a cultural calendar, or the transfer station (Wes--the guy at the dump was nice to me...of course, paying $55 to get a sticker for the van that died 90 minutes after its first and only trip there...O Irony, Lay The Hell Off Me)? I had read in the paper at one point that the folks at Boxcar Media got the contract for it, but that was months ago. When is v1.0 about to go live?

At least we can pay our property tax and water bill online.

Here in 2006, when your Aunt Gert's sewing circle gets its own Yahoo Group and the town of Lanesborough has a better web site than you do--it's time to easily and cheaply make it just that much easier for non-area people to get the information they need to come here and hit the ground running. We don't need to have Cambridge's...or Pittsfield's...or Fitchburg's...or even Adams'...but it would have helped us a lot, and will definitely help new folks find their way here and their way around.

The Madkitchen of Chaillot, or, Somewhere Bob Vila is Laughing

2006-10-07T00:38:00.000-04:00

Most people who know Tara and I know several things about us:

   a) We're tall
   b) We're usually together
   c) We're lifelong apartment dwellers who are trying to remodel our kitchen ourselves
   d) As a result, we currently have neither a functioning stove nor plumbed sink in the kitchen.

We're making do pretty well with our toaster oven, electric kettle, and gas grill. No microwave, though; we're a little superstitious about the wiring in the kitchen and want to upgrade it before we buy the one we want. But to do the wiring, we wanted to have the dishwasher in place. For that, we'd need the plumbing set up. And we couldn't have the plumber in until the cabinets (which we bought special-order and finished ourselves) and countertop (epoxy resin, which is a whole other post) were installed. And I couldn't even really start THAT until I had laid the new floor, which meant removing the old enamel sink/countertop monstrosity, the plumbing for that, and then leveling the existing floor.

But before we wanted to do the floor, we wanted to finish the demo: taking down a fun greenboard and plaster wall to expose the brick chimney, and ripping out the old drop ceiling (first) then the even-more-fun lath-and-plaster ceiling (next) to expose the upstairs plumbing for when we need to do the bathroom.

The 10-day break I took after running a 12 penny nail through my foot during THAT particular Adventure In Homeowning was just a bonus.

Anyway, we just got the countertop in last week, so now we can plumb the sink and dishwasher, have our pals at McLain Electric run a couple more circuits and install some outlets and wall switches, and we can start talking about the tile and other wallish matters. And the stove, well, that's a whole other post too. But with cool pictures.

But having to replace the whole heating system last month has taken our full attention off the kitchen, and with two vehicles on a first-name basis with the guys at AAA, it's turned into another kitchen sinkless week. I would wield the wrenches myself, but Tara, bless her heart, knows exactly what would happen if I did. Well, not exactly: she can't decide if I'd flood the house or poison the drinking water for a four-block radius. The professionals shall have at this, in due course; at least if they sicken the neighborhood we'll have someone to blame.

Saturday In The Parkade

2006-10-05T12:49:00.000-04:00

There's an editorial in today's Transcript and a story in yesterday's edition lauding the new Parkade--the long-awaited reopening of the former KMart plaza a block south of Main Street.

I think everyone's pretty psyched about the movie theatre. Some are psyched about the Olympia Sports, but if it's anything like the one down in Pittsfield, I wouldn't get too excited. And Peebles--well, I'm not feelin' the love from that many folks there. Tara wants to start a campaign to bring a Lane Bryant to town, and she's got a great point. Nearest one is in Albany, where there's tax on clothes; next one is in Holyoke. Anyone listening over there?

I'm a bit shocked at the disappointment when the Applebee's fell through. I think it's a good thing for the nearby full-service American casual restaurants right around there--Boston Seafood, the Freight Yard Pub, and Friendly's--all of which would be competing around the same price point without much of a difference in selection. If it has to be a chain restaurant, I'd like to see something more ethnic that would spice up the local offerings while still being mainstream enough to gain acceptance among less adventurous palates. Maybe an On the Border, or Don Pablo's? How about a reasonably priced steak place a la Kneebones in Allendale? Or an Irish pub? PF Chang's? Bertucci's? Tony Roma's?

Yeah, I realize how easy it is to sit here and cherry-pick what restaurants I'd like to see here and not actually do anything about it. What can the average citizen do, though? How can Joe Sixpack help the city get hooked up with a Lane Bryant and a Benihana?

And what punster came up with the name "Parkade"? It sounds like an energy drink made out of trees and benches and young couples pushing strollers on Sunday morning.

Looking forward to seeing how this all plays out this winter and spring.

There's A New Blog In Town

2006-10-04T17:35:00.000-04:00

While I'm not new to the concept of blogging, I've never felt that there was much need for me to speak up--especially since there are a number of voices that are doing a helluva job capturing the spirit up here in the Northern Berkshires and beyond.

Well, I changed my mind.

My wife and I are new(ish) to the area. We bought a 120-year-old house in North Adams this past winter, and we're trying to fix it up. We're trying to get more involved in our community--seeing what works, what isn't working, and where we can pitch in.

I want to add my opinions to the discussions on the best approaches to public policy, regional planning, city and state politics, and the role of government in the average American's life--realizing the wide variety in the definition of the "average" American. I want to get the opinions of the folks who read blogs like this (realizing there's even WIDER variety of the "average" blogger) and have a decent debate.

I want to talk about fixing up this house I have here. Real estate is a great motivator of human behavior and much of politics at the local level, to be honest, is homeowners and small businesses trying to maximize their investments. Plus, there are more hands after the ever-dwindling contents of my wallet than ever. I could always use the advice of those who have gone before me down the unheated, windowless hall of home ownership.

I want to talk about business, the media, human relations, my family, and our dog Winston. I think nothing would be better than dragging the Northern Berkshires kicking and screaming into the 21st century, attracting more learned minds, more skilled hands, and a decent Chinese retaurant. These buffets are just grease-and-MSG palaces, and Chopsticks in Williamstown has crummy service on the order of a major European city. Good to know that at least one thing up here is up to world-class level.

Eh, but if nobody reads this blog, so be it. Could be worse.