Tag: news

Protests, First Night and Boston Getting it Wrong

I’ll tell you right up front as I start this that I’m as much of a fan of First Night here in Boston as I am of the 4th of July.  Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that I hate the crowds and accompanying stupidity for both just as much, but what the 4th stands for matters more to me.  And, I’ve never been able to figure out why they call the celebration of the last night of the year First Night.

Anyway, New Year’s Eve here in Boston is celebrated with a giant city-wide party.  You can buy a button that will get you into all kinds of things for free.  There are concerts, ice sculptures, fireworks, skating, dancing, face painting, puppet shows, museums, all sorts of things.  The list is almost endless and it is entirely impossible to do it all in one evening.  This has been happening as long as I’ve been living here and, though it nearly went bankrupt and stopped happening a year or so ago, it is back with a vengeance now.

Enter politicians and police to screw it all up.

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When good causes go awry

Good people make mistakes.  It happens.  No one is perfect.  How we acknowledge those mistakes, and how we try to make amends, that is what’s critical to getting along with everyone, especially those who are harmed by our mistakes.  It makes a world of difference whether we recognize the harm we sometimes do as individuals, as organizations, and even as nations.

And that is why it truly pains me to see groups that I believe in make bad, even horrible mistakes, and then fail to do the right thing afterward.  It is just heartbreaking.  And lately it seems like it is one after another.

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Requiem for a Bookstore

Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that independent bookstores are a bit hard to come by these days.  We’re lucky here in the People’s Republic, because we still have a lot of them.  But on Friday one of them went the way of the Dodo and the world is a little less fun for it.  So long, Lorem Ipsum.

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Plan your November, Boston! Start here.

There are all sorts of amazing things happening in November this year.  I just happen to be involved in one of them each weekend leading up to Thanksgiving.  Are you looking to plan your activities and maybe get a jump on some handmade Christmas shopping?  Look no further.

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Municipal broadband for Cambridge?

Oh, please please please let it happen.  We did notice a question about our internet service on our last resident survey so it got us thinking about it again.

As some of you may have noticed, Kelly and I have had repeated issues with the quality of our Internet service here in Cambridge over the years.  It is something that both of us care deeply about as both of us have worked in IT and both of us are everyday users of the Internet for personal and business purposes.  But considering that we live in what I would consider the technology capital of the East Coast, the quality and quantity of Internet service providers is terrible, frankly. Cambridge considers itself a major center for innovation and it certainly is, but it is also somewhat ridiculous that for many people Internet connectivity is both expensive and unreliable.

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Congratulations, #AlisonBechdel !

One of my favorite cartoonists (whom Kelly and I had the privilege of meeting a few years ago) has won a MacArthur “Genius Grant“.  ThinkProgress also has this interview with her.

I am so excited for her.   I literally cheered when I read the news.

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So… Scotland… I hear you might be single soon…

Wow.  Just, wow.

I am amazed, truly amazed, that this movement for Scotland to gain independence may actually succeed after all.  The referendum is set to take place this Thursday.

And it is an extremely complicated issue, one that I would imagine the overwhelming majority of Americans (including myself) understand very little, outside of having seen the superb (but historically inaccurate) movie Braveheart.

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Another maritime mystery closer to being solved

The Canadian government announced yesterday that it had discovered one of the lost ships from Franklin’s Expedition, the British Arctic exploration voyage led by Captain Sir John Franklin that disappeared in the 1840s.  While it is still unknown whether the shipwreck is that of HMS Erebus or HMS Terror, it is pretty clear that one of the two vessels has been found by an remotely operated underwater vehicle using side-scan sonar.

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Today’s Craigslist Horror

Regular readers will know that I use the Free section on Craigslist to amuse myself.  As today is a sort of vacation day for me, I popped over there just now to see if there was anything funny worth tweeting.  I found something absolutely totally and completely NOT worth tweeting.  It was so awful, especially in light of all of the horrible racist atrocities happening in Ferguson, MO and elsewhere right now, that it merited its own blog post.

What could possibly be that bad you might ask?  I’ll show you.  Be prepared.

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Don’t call up Bruce Willis yet, but…

a fairly sizable asteroid has been spotted on a trajectory that gives it a fairly decent chance (about 1 in 4,000)  of striking the Earth.   That is actually better odds than the chance you will get killed in a traffic accident any time you get in a car (1 in 6,700).  At one point the odds were actually being calculated at 1 in 300.  So this particular object has raised a few eyebrows, to put it mildly.    Enough that some people think it would be time to call the drilling crew together.   Or something.

Continue reading “Don’t call up Bruce Willis yet, but…”