Archive for 2009

Metro USA has been sold by its Swedish owner to a company called Seabay Media, which is headed by Metro’s former CEO, Pelle Tornberg (Törnberg in Swedish) who’s widely regarded as the newspapers founder. Metro’s American newspapers have a week-daily circulation of 590,000 and supposedly snag 1.2 million readers in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston [...]

A photograph of a sign in a Pottery Barn Kids store at Burlington Mall in Burlington, Massachusetts: Are they sure it’s “”their” space” and not “their “space”?” …as long as it isn’t a spelling bee Here’s a sign from a CVS store in Winchester in Massachusetts: A question mark would have been in order in [...]

It was only recently that the New England Patriots started using Twitter to communicate with the team’s fans but they are now fully embracing so-called micro-blogging as a way to communicate with the fans. Realpatriots is the team’s main account. PATRIOTSdotCOM is announces new material on the Patriots web site. PatriotPlace promotes the Patriot Place [...]

The New York Times reports on stagnating test scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress: Despite gains that both whites and minorities did make, the overall scores of the United States’ 17-year-old students, averaged across all groups, were the same as those of teenagers who took the test in the early 1970s. This was [...]

Massachusetts State Legislature has produced a veto-proof majority to increase the state’s sales tax from 5% to 7% to help meet the projected deficit in the state budget. The pros and cons of tax hikes versus deficit spending versus budget cuts are well established, as are the pros and cons of increasing the sales tax [...]

Patriots Picked Twelve Players In the 2009 Draft The 2009 NFL draft is over. The New England Patriots picked four players in the second round after trading out of the first round entirely, two in the third, one in the fourth, and one in the fifth, two in the sixth and two in the seventh [...]

Interesting nugget from British retail giant Tesco’s take on the global economy,as reported by the Wall Street Journal (subscription may be required): One exception to the trend [of "upswing in consumer sentiment"], Tesco said, was the Western U.S. Tesco’s stores in Southern California, Phoenix and Las Vegas have been hit hard by the collapse of [...]

Patriot Place, the retail center next to the New England Patriots home field Gillette Stadium, is working pretty hard to drum up business. On Patriots Day, April 20 – which has nothing to do with the Patriots – shoppers were allowed to walk across the field at the stadium, the movie theater showed the Boston [...]

Everybody’s favorite Cambridge radio station, WJIB 740-AM, is mentioned and its owner Bob Bittner quoted in an article in today’s Wall Street Journal on commercial radio stations asking listeners for contributions (subscription may be req.). The article points to the dramatic decline in radio advertising revenue (-9% in 2008) as reason, but WJIB launched its [...]

Would it have killed the Boston Globe’s Maria Sachetti to interview an American whose been hurt or had a relative killed by an illegal alien in an auto accident? Does she only interview people who are provided to her by amnesty advocates? Why didn’t she define what constitutes a “hard-core” crime so the rest of [...]