Archive for April, 2005

I finally got around to watch Fever Pitch, the Americanized, Bostonized version of the British novel Fever Pitch. It was good, but not great. The Red Sox winning the World Series (holy cow!) screwed up the movie’s ending in ways that the Farrelly brothers couldn’t quite overcome. That’s okay, though. Just the thought of the [...]

Mass Backwards applauds some creative police work in New Ipswich in New Hampshire: The local constabulary has arrested an illegal alien from Mexico for trespassing. Will the court uphold the arrest? One can only hope. We’ll find out on Tuesday.

I see that an editorial writer in a Swedish socialist newspaper calls the fall of Saigon 30 years ago “the liberation of Saigon.” That’s a perfect illustration of what passes for liberty in the eyes of socialists.

They’ve been busy getting the old but improved Burberry store ready and open for the summer season on Newbury Street. The Boston Herald reports that the store will open its doors on May 15. I know it’s not Burberry’s fault that its apparel has become thugwear, and the company did drop its hooligan-must-have checkered hat, [...]

It’s quite possible that the current soft patch, to use a popular phrase, in the economy is mostly or even entirely due to the high price for crude oil, but the patch is still soft and I’m not particularly optimistic about it firming any time soon. What is worrying is that there are so many [...]

Am I the only who finds it amusing that a Congressman criticized the National Football League because its steroids policy “is not perfect”? When I was a young boy in the Old Country – this would have been in the early 1980′s – I heard many a stories told by former exchange students about high-school [...]

Perhaps you don’t like the Boston herald because of its tabloid mentality, or its right-wing (and not particularly interesting) editorial board, or the narrow range of news covered by the newspaper, but you should like the fact that the paper competes with the Boston Globe over city news. The last few weeks have given us [...]

One of New England Patriots allocations to NFL Europe, Cedric James, had an impressive game in a losing effort against Berlin Thunder. James caught three passes for 62 yards for his Rhine Fire, with the longest catch for 48 yards. He also made some solid blocks, and delivered at least one real slobberknocker. He still [...]

Losing headquarters is bad, bad, bad for a local or regional economy (or national, for that matter). Boston has become the un-Headquarters of America, or Branch Office USA, but is of course not the only city wrestling with that problem. Here’s an article from North Carolina regarding AllPosters swallowing the smaller, Raleigh-based Art.com. Art.com became [...]

Yesterday morning the ugly old T-station building in Kenmore Square, better suited for an Old Country tätort than the Hub of the Universe, was finally torn down. The missus wondered why they didn’t blow up the one-story shack, Las Vegas style, a move that would have given Back Bay Village, I mean Kenmore Square, some [...]