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My Earthfest Pet Peeve

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Earthfest is this Saturday on the Esplanade. If past practice is any guide, DCR will once again allow folks to park along Storrow Drive, creating a massive traffic jam that can easily stretch all the way up the Leverett Connector onto I-93. So, the convenience of a few hundred folks wins out over the thousands who use that road (average daily (probably weekday) traffic volume of 66,000, as of 2006). In the past, DCR has claimed that the cars act as a safety barrier, but I’m skeptical of that explanation. My two questions: 1) Is deliberately congesting a road and putting tens of thousands into stop and go traffic really making a great “Earthfest” point? 2) If DCR was more […]

Raising the Symbolism Bar

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Sure, our local politicians have their symbolism — who can forget Bill Weld diving into the Charles River or Deval Patrick’s ongoing struggle to move past the drapes and Cadillac brouhaha. But Canada’s Governor General has taken this to a whole new (pretty gross) level. In an effort to show solidarity with indigenous seal hunters (who are facing an EU ban), she helped gut a seal and ate a slice of its raw heart.

Questions Michael Flaherty, Sam Yoon and Kevin McCrea should be asking

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The Globe this week ran successive stories (here and here) regarding Boston’s new computer tracking system for city services. In this morning’s article, the three candidates challenging Mayor Menino were unsurprisingly critical of the new system – that it took too long to get up and running, that it still isn’t a true CitiStat program like the one Somerville uses and Baltimore pioneered, that posting the data to the Boston About Results website every quarter doesn’t give either residents or city managers real time data. All of that might be true, but I want to pose some questions of my own. 1) Why does budget data on BAR still only include the appropriations for FY08 and not the actual expenditures? […]

I am about to toss my cookies

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That was my dad’s self-edited way of expressing his disregard for stupidity. Granted my dad was a marine and therefore knew other ways to express his disgust. He was also a Greek immigrant and, because he went to war as a young guy, largely self-educated. He understood how essential it was to know math and English and U.S. History to succeed in a country where the haves have a red carpet out for them. Well, when a friend passed on this morsel — a video with Cookie Monster peddling 21st-century skills — there is little else I could say… especially in a blog post where I cannot employ spicier words for these donkeys. The lack of critical thought and faddishness […]

Wet, Wetter, Wettest

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Jack Butterworth reported in the Daily Item on a recent town hall meeting with the Governor and Secretary of Education S. Paul Reville in the library of Marblehead High School. Among some good proposals such as pension reform for public employees, the speakers also called for “a graduated income tax which will take four years to achieve” and “MCAS testing reform.” Longtime tax foe Barbara Anderson of Marblehead spoke against the graduated income tax after seeing hands go up in support of it, calling the proposal a plan “to pick us off, one tax bracket at a time.” “The harder you work the more they steal from you. That’s why the voters defeated it at the ballot,” she said. Butterworth […]