Archive for November, 2006

Sure, it’s just a throw-away pep-song for a corporate meeting, and a surprisingly well-made one to boot, but it’s just too, too much. Bank of America’s “One” music video suffers in production value (these effects aren’t so special, as one famous critic famously put it), but the rendition is heartfelt. (I wish Mixed Nuts were [...]

Seth Gitell has a post on his father’s service in Vietnam and his grandfather’s service in Italy during World War 2. Coincidentally, my father-in-law and my wife’s grandfather served in those campaigns as well, the former in 101st Airborne and the latter in 10th Mountain Division. The campaign in Italy isn’t exactly the forgotten war, [...]

Another accident at the intersection of Commonwealth Avenue and Charlesgate West, but this time on the westbound side, where a car rear ended a Brookline cab and pushed one of its wheels up on the sidewalk. I have seen such accidents before, but they are much less frequent than the red-light running accidents in the [...]

Conservative journalist Steve Sailer has tallied up the votes in the Congressional elections and finds a 3.3 million – 8 million vote gap between the Democrats and the Republicans. What hurt Republicans the most, according to Mr. Sailer, was the huge drop-off among white voters, who still make up close to 80% of voters. The [...]

Another sad tale from the morally disintegrating British white underclass. Thomas Lee Wood has been sentenced to 21 for unprovoked stabbing a young man to death. Often “unprovoked” means the victim actually did provoke the attacker, verbally or physically, but in a context that makes no sense to media people or prosecutors so they insist [...]

There’s a spirited debate at Boston Gal’s Open Wallet over the pros and cons of a federal minimum wage hike now that the Democrats control both the House and the Senate. I have a wishy-washy, flip-flopping, nuanced, pragmatic, and evolved position on minimum wage. The current federal minimum wage is $5.15. The new rate being [...]

The guys on the Patriots Football Weekly In Progress podcast yesterday got an email from a listener in Nicaragua which prompted the following burst of on-air reactions from the hosts: “Where’s Nicaragua??” … “Is that Imelda Marcos and the shoes and her husband and all that?” … “I thought there was something happening there?” “Yeah, [...]

The United States Census Bureau misestimated Boston’s population in 2005 by more than 6%, a margin of error that doesn’t inspire much confidence in the Bureau. There are unanswered questions about the revision, but certainly the consensus right now is that the revision is correct and previous estimates were wrong. Given that, one might expect [...]

Massachusetts Democrat gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick has, as expected, won a landslide victory. The soon to be governor ends a 16-year run of increasingly conservative but decreasingly effective Republican governors. He becomes the first African-American governor of Massachusetts. I’m not surprised that he won, especially considering the opponents, but what I absolutely cannot fathom is [...]

The new Charlie ticket machines are in place at the Davis Square t-stop, but not yet in action.