Andy at I, Ectomorph is looking for a noun that could be packaged as a book that bills the noun as something that changed the world.

I’d offer corn, but it’s probably been done to death already. Post-it notes? Velcro? Comic books?

Richard Seymour has been named to the AFC Pro Bowl team.

Should have been Ty Warren. Warren’s had a heck of a season.

The Kenmore Square basement that was vacated by Deli Haus a few years ago has been brought back to life by The Lower Depths, a bar that should appeal to Red Sox fans, students of age, people attracted to the new Kenmore Square, people on their way to Lansdowne Street, and, no doubt least importantly, the area’s few non-student residents.

The Lower Depths sports 74 different kinds of beer, including a couple of domestic light ones for those of us who appreciate loud plainness over craftmanship and pride, and 16 different drafts. Its menu pays homage to both the ghost of Deli Haus (The Kenmore melt) and the owner’s previous success stories (a soup from Bukowski’s, some other dish from another place). Right now I can only vouch for the roast beef sandwich and the sloppy joe’s, but I have no doubt I shall have pleasurable encounters with many of the other menu items in the months to come.

Former WRKO talk-show host John DePetro writes on his web site:

I will be on WABC in New York,the number one talk station in the world, all next week. I will be filling in for John Gambling from 10AM to 12 noon. John DePetro on WABC Dec 26-29.

Number of pictures of Mr. DePetro on frontpage of depetro.com: 4. The record stands at 5.

There are problems on the Emerald Island:

One of Ireland’s leading Catholic clergymen today called for national unity in the face of the evil of spiralling gangland murder.
As pressure mounted on the Government with five murders in six days, Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin said a culture of violence was beginning to devastate the capital city.
Against a background of public outrage over the murder of an innocent bystander in a gangland hit, he said Dublin communities were being ripped apart by drugs.
“There are some who feel that they have a right to callously disregard the dignity of human life - even of innocent bystanders - in order to foster their criminal interests. There can be nothing further from the message of the Gospel and we all have responsibility to denounce such violence,” the clergyman said.
Justice Minister Michael McDowell admitted the situation was serious with innocent people being put in danger.
In the latest attack, well-known criminal Gerard Byrne, 25, was gunned down outside the Mace supermarket in the International Financial Services Centre in Dublin shortly before 9pm last night.
Byrne, who was originally from nearby Ferryman’s Crossing in inner-city Dublin, was believed to have been heavily involved in armed robberies. He was arrested in Raheny a number of months ago by Irish police who believed he was on his way to carry out a murder. Mr McDowell dismissed opposition calls for the army to be deployed in parts of Dublin and insisted police had been given record levels of resources to deal with the spate of killings.

Ireland has not only U.S.-style gangland violence, but also Euro-style riots in public-housing projects:

Two 15-year-old boys, who were part of a violent gang that attacked gardaí with stones and bottles and hit a female Garda on the stomach with a brick, have been detained for two years by Judge Bryan Smyth at the Dublin Children’s Court today.

A third boy, also aged 15, who had a lesser role, was detained for two months.

…

They were convicted for assaulting gardaí, obstruction, being drunk and disorderly and breach of the peace, arising from the violent disturbance in Ballymun, which went on for more than two hours, on the night of May 13 last.

Gardaí from six north Dublin stations and the Garda helicopter were called in to give backup.

At one stage they had to retreat before going back in to disperse the youths.

Former Boston top cop Kathleen O’Toole has an answer to the problems: The police should hire more civilians.

Minister for Justice Michael McDowell is to seek Government approval this week for the employment of more civilian staff to the Garda Síochána to free up officers from administrative duties to fight crime.

…

The new chief inspector of the Garda Inspectorate, Kathleen O’Toole, recently recommended the appointment of more civilians to the Garda Síochána and it is understood Mr McDowell wants to fast-track those recommendations. He also wants more support staff in the Courts Service to complement the appointment of nine new judges announced by the Government last week.

Authorities in Paris have denied H&M’s request to open a 30,000 sq ft store on Champs Elysees.

‘There is a risk that the Champs Elysées could become banal,’ Lynne Cohen-Solal, head of planning at Paris’s city council, said. ‘We have nothing against H&M.’ Nevertheless, she pointed out that clothes occupied 39 per cent of the retail space on the avenue, which was ‘the maximum’.

‘We want to maintain a variety of culture, restaurants and shopping,’ she said. ‘It’s important to us that the cinemas and the cafés remain. Oxford Street is a bit the example of what we want to avoid.’

I’m sure Ms. Cohen-Solal took some amount of pleasure in gratuitously slamming the famous street in London. I rather like Oxford Street, where, among many other hijinks, me and a buddy of mine met a couple of Prod chicks from Ulster, but she’s got a point, if you have street like Champs Elysees, you can’t let it turn into a street of the kind you can find in every major city in the developed world.

Retail analysts say the Champs Elysées is a prize location not only because it attracts half a million people a day - 850,000 on Saturdays - but also because of its symbolic value. ‘When you go there, you aim well beyond the French market,’ Emmanuelle Gaye, spokeswoman for Adidas, whose biggest store opened there in October, said.

In other H&M news:

H&M to open its first store in Japan, a 16,000 sq ft outlet in Tokyo.

The “master of low-priced high fashion” to collborate with Madonna, for whom the company will create a special line of off-stage clothes.

H&M’s rapid sales growth below expectations (”like for like sales” sounds pretty lame compared to “same store sales”).

Swedish tabloid Expressen claims to have “secured the future” for a 12-year old Thai who worked in an H&M plant. The girl had been placed there by her uncle which makes one wonder how much her future was secured: Perhaps working there was pretty good, if not, maybe the problem is the girl’s family rather than H&M?

The New England Patriots rebounded from last week’s disappointing loss to Miami by flattening the Houston Texans 40-7.

Ellis Hobbs scored a touchdown on a 93-yard kick-off return. Kevin Faulk scored a nice 11 yard run behind excellent lead blocks by tight-end Daniel Graham and fullback and Heath Evans, and then again on a beautiful 43 yard screen pass perfectly timed against a heavy blitz that left the three lead-blocking offensive linement with nobody to block. Kicker Stephen Gostkowski made all extra points and all four field goal attempts he faced. Corey Dillon rushed for 61 yards on 20 carries, while quarterback Tom Brady completed 16 of 23 passes for 109 yards and two touchdowns. The offensive numbers were held down largely because the Patriots played so much of the game on a short field after turnover by Houston.

The defense played very well against a weak opponent. Mike Wright played well in place of injured nose-tackle Vince Wilfork and made a sack that blew up a screen play. Outside linebackers Tully Banta Cain and Rosevelt Colvin feasted on Houtson’s poor pass protection. Defensive end Richard Seymour made a great play when he deflected and intercepted a pass. Cornerback Asante Samuel made his eighth interception of his season. Safety James Sanders and Hobbs also had an interception each.

Next week the 10-4 Patriots play the 8-6 Jaguars in Jacksonville.

My father’s getting ready to rev up the chainsaw to cut down a few pine trees that have done their duty as seeding trees on a ridge that was clear-cut a few years ago. He told me prices for pine tree timber are high now, which surprised me since the market was saturated with trees felled by an epic storm that ravaged forests in southern Sweden early last year. Turns out a number of factors are at work. On the demand side construction is strong in Sweden and other parts of Europe. On the supply side, some interesting developments have converged: Beetles are chewing their way through western Canada’s vast forests, tax-law changes in Finland has reduced cutting there, and jacked up export-duties in Russia have further cut into supply.

A spat has broken out between WRKO talk-show host Scott Allen Miller and Boston Globe metro columnist Eileen McNamara over a column by the latter on the decision by Needham High School’s school council to stop sending the honor roll to Needham Times, where it has been published for some unspecified period of time. In her column Ms. McNamara claimed that Mr. Miller discussed the issue sneeringly and implied that he is an uncaring “media mouth.” Mr. Miller has complained that his treatment of the subject hasn’t been sneering at all and that he, as a Needham resident with school-age children, has been personally touched by the tragedies that have befallen Needham’s youth in recent years. Professor Media Critic Dan Kennedy thinks the Globe owes its readers a clarification, if only because the newspaper seems rather loose with them anyway.

While Mr. Miller is concerned about his reputation in Needham, I’m taken aback by Ms. McNamara’s not overly informative handling of the story.

The backdrop to the disccusion over whether to publush the honor roll or not are several tragedies that have befallen Needham in recent years, perhaps most notably four
suicides. The decision not to make the honor roll public is motivated by a desire to reduce pressure on children to reach the standards required to make the honor roll.

Ms. McNamara fails her readers in several ways:

1) She doesn’t write how the decision was made or who came up with the idea, leaving the reader with the impression that it was all the work of the school’s principal Paul Richards. According to Jim Boyd at TheBostonChannel.com, the idea originated with a parent and the
decision was made by the “school council,” whatever that is.

2) She writes:

This is [Richards's] third year as principal in a town that has suffered four suicides of young people since he took the helm at the high school.

That may well leave the reader with the impression that the four dead were high school students, but at least two of them were not: One was a middle school student and one was a former high-school student who’d gone off to college. The suicides took place in an 18 month span from Thanksgiving 2004 to April this year.

3) Ms. McNamara gives the impression that the decision was based on facts from a student-attitude survey. She quotes a letter from Mr. Richards:

“Our stress survey data identifies a sub-culture among students where grades are scrutinized, argued over, compared within groups, and are a contributor to a general environment of comparisons between peers. While any of these behaviors are not extreme when isolated, the cumulative effect can be stress inducing (and not the good kind of stress that helps us all perform, meet deadlines and grow.)”

Ms. McNamara seems unbothered by the disconnect between the supposed problem, which is that students scrutinize and discuss grades, and the proposed solution, which is to not make the honor roll public.

It’s as if the school had banned the display apples to prevent students from eating oranges. Nor does she find anything problematic about the open-ended, catch-all nature of the phrase “the cumulative effect can be stress inducing.”

4) Previous reporting in the Globe suggests that Mr. Richards had already taken steps to reduce stress on his students before last spring’s suicide by banning homework assignments over the summer break, except for “reading for English class.” Ms. McNamara makes no mention of this in her column.

5) Ms. McNamara again quotes a letter from Mr. Richards:

“By having an Honor Roll in the first place, the school participates in a sorting of students.”

But previous reporting by the Globe shows that Mr. Richards advocates “sorting” of students who apply for Advanced Placement classes. That is at it should be, but demolishes the notion that the school can avoid “sorting” its students. Ms. McNamara, who may well not have asked the principal a single critical question, or any question at all, let’s the principal’s rather disingenous claim go unchallenged.

6) Ms. McNamara writes:

Talk to honor roll students in the parking lot after class and it is clear that not many of them care whether their name makes it into print. All of them care about the suicides that have, in part, defined their high school years.

Everyone knows the names of the academic stars as well as they know the names of their school’s sports heroes. All of them deserve to be celebrated. Richards has only questioned the method.

Considering the topic of Ms. McNamara’s column it ought to be clear to her that Mr. Richards hasn’t “only questioned” the method. He has actually helped change it. Heck, he changed it if one is to understand Ms. McNamara properly.

One could also take issue with phrases like “all of them care about the suicides,” “everyone knows,” “talk to honor roll students in the parking lot” or how Ms. McNamara believes the honor roll students can be both celebrated and kept secret, but, as everyone knows, perhaps through osmosis, Ms. McNamara is a Pulitzer Prize winner so one probably souldn’t.

Besides those reporting deficiencies, Ms. McNamara advances a a dubious proposition to support the de-emphasis of academic acheivement:

Marilee Jones, the dean of admissions at MIT, has made a mission of talking to parents and school administrators across the country about the need to reduce the pressure to compete. She calls it “turning down the flame.”

I call it a brilliant IQ-test of sorts: If you’re dumb enough to heed that advice you’re clearly not MIT material. Those who keep the flame burning brightly will thank those who drop out of the competition.

From June 4: The economic reactionism of Eileen McNamara.

Udolpho’s take on the PS3 hype and subsequent bust.

…I read that scalpers bought up boxes and boxes of PS3 consoles on launch day in order to unload them at huge mark-ups. Perhaps even a majority of shipping consoles were bought for this purpose – at the very least a large enough number to affect supply throughout the country (Sony was only able to get 200,000 manufactured for the United States to begin with).

An interesting object lesson awaited them.