Facebook and the campaign trail

How can you take seriously a candidate who at 6:00 pm  posts “I’m campaigning like a madman” on his Facebook page, when, at 4:30 that same day, you learned that he’d achieved level 215 as a skilled underworld boss in Mafia Wars?  That this same guy owns and edits a newspaper (like, he’s a media guy, right?) leaves one wondering and writing a check to his opponent.

Book Bound – Of Ownership and the Kindle

Years ago, at a staff meeting at the public library where I worked, the director mentioned that she was looking into buying e-books.  The atmosphere chilled. ”What will happen to books?” the collective silence seemed to say. But with the realization that an e-reader could carry the contents of hundreds of books, heads started bobbing up and down. “Yes!” thought these profligate readers, “an end to lugging buldging book bags for that week at the beach!” 

So why, 15 years later, am I still buying books? Cost is one barrier. But more profoundly, there is the question of ownership.  When I buy a traditional book, there is no question, I become the book’s owner.  It is mine to read, lend, sell, shelve, or prop open a window. I am the boss of the thing.   When buying an e-book, however, there is a subtle shift.  The purchase of an e-book is covered by the terms of a service agreement. What I am buying is not the book, but access to the book.  No longer the book’s owner, I am the book’s consumer.  In that small shift, I become more like someone who watches a television program, and less like someone who masters a text.  Suddenly that book bag doesn’t seem so heavy.

The long tail of Obama’s election

“A lot of these local politicans need to watch out…This has brought a whole new crowd into politics.” The money quote from this story in today’s paper http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/nyregion/04race.html?_r=1&hp

The difference between silos and barns

One of the features of working in a silo is that you spend much of your time working with like-minded individuals who are focused on many of the same issues that you focus on.  A barn, however, houses people who work in different areas – some plow, some milk the cow, some shoe the horses – a setting conducive to cross-pollination, and thus more likely to produce innovation.

On the passage of Senator Kennedy

 I was first eligible to vote in the 1980 election.  I was in college, living in Boston, and registered to vote near campus.  A few months earlier, Ted Kennedy shook the floor of the Democratic convention with his the Dream will Never Die  speech. Ted Kennedy was on the ballot, running for re-election to the Senate that year.  I voted for him then, and in every election since then.  That first time, I felt a very real connection to the Kennedys that I was too young to vote for. 

That first time I knew about Ted and Mary Jo and what happened at the bridge, and I suspected that being being married to a Kennedy required a special kind of suffering. Even the most cursory study of the Kennedy family reveals that Camelot is a pretty lie. But the important truth about our Senator lies not in his flaws, but in his work on behalf of the people of Massachusetts to the benefit of the nation. Requiescat in pace.

“Say hey, goodlooking! What you got cooking?”

A Feminist Critique of Michael Pollan’s “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch“

We cook.  We eat.  Sometimes we cook fancy meals, and eat off bone china by candle light in the dining room. Sometimes we cook not so fancy meals and eat of plastic plates in the kitchen.  Sometimes we don’t cook and eat at restaurant that a food market research would describe as mid-range, family oriented. And sometimes we don’t cook and eat at a restaurant that is run by one of our nation’s top chief.  At the mid-range, family restaurant – a Bugaboo Creak Streak House at a near by mall – I’ve ordered filet mignon, ceaser salad and a glass of California Cabernet. At Jasper White’s Summer Shack, I’ve ordered a cheeseburger and a beer.  Cooking, as well as eating, is seldom all or nothing.  To have meaning, cooking and eating require context. 

Cold cuts, for example.  For Michael Pollan, putting cold cuts between two slices of bread is a sign that American women have beaten a path out of the kitchen and into the t.v. room to watch FoodTV. If Iwere to take those same cold cuts, roll them up, put them on  a plate with some olives, and a piece of cheese, am I more or less an authentic cook than the sandwich maker?  What if the sandwich maker made the bread that frames the sandwich? 

Harry Balzer, the food-marketing research that Pollan interviewed, clearly did not know my grandmother.  Gran was a famously bad cook and the idea that she is spinning in her grave over how I prepare a meal is laughable. (Actually, Gran was cremated, so becoming a dust devil would be a more appropriate image.)  Born in 1911, my material grandmother was a gin-drinking flapper who raised three children and overcooked everything.  I highly doubt that she ever rung the neck of a chicken or churned butter.  She rarely seasoned with anything other than salt and pepper.

Like Michael Pollan, I watched Julia Child cook on t.v. sitting next to my mother.  This is when my mother’s cooking began to go beyond her mother’s mushy green beans and tough as nails leg of lamb.  This is the foundation that my cooking is built on.  Sometimes I make salad dressing.  Sometimes I don’t.  What I pour on the lettuce has little to do with what agribusiness would have me believe is better for my family and everything to do with how much time I happen to have.  However, even when making the dressing from scratch, I didn’t press the olives to make the oil, or fire the kiln that baked the salad dish. There are only so many hours in the day.

The most important thing about Julia Child, a point that Pollan misses, is that she wasn’t presumptuous.  She told us something that we always suspected – that a well made sandwich is better than an ill cooked roast.

It Ain’t No Secret…the Democratic Party & Same Sex Marriage

In a recent Daily Beast post, Cindy McCain called Barack Obama’s opposition to same-sex marriage a “dirty little secret.”  Hell, it ain’t no secret.  At least not to this same-sex voter, or anyone else who looked the issue on his web page.  In fact, his position was pretty much the same as Hiliary Clinton’s position.  And yesterday, being tax day, us same-sex couples here in Massachusetts were reminded that while our marriage is legal in the Commonwealth, it is not recognized by the Federal government, because the Ole Triangulator, William Jefferson Clinton, signing into law the Defense of Marriage Act. But, as a thinking voter, which political party should I align myself with – the group that favors civil unions, but still has some learning to do regarding same-sex marriage, or the group who’s ranks include those who are very vocal in their belief that I must be a child molester?

Don’t You Hate It When…

…you read something like this in the newspaper:

“After  a year of cosmetic repairs, the Major Highway overpass seems to be falling apart from the inside out – if you take a good look at the side of the aging bridge by standing next to the intersection of Some Big Avenue, and Main-ish Streets, you can see the main support steel beams rotted all the way through. Maybe this is a good spot to start dumping some of the stimulus cash before it gets eaten as well.”

If you live in Somerville, Massachusetts, this news item was  reported in the March 18, 2009 edition of the Somerville News.  The McGrath Highway overpass at Somerville Ave and Medford Street is wearing out.  This is bad news.  Last year cosmetic repairs were made to this overpass.  This is embarrassing news. 

Isn’t making cosmetic repairs to  a highway overpass a little like like putting wallpaper on a wall that’s losing it’s plaster?  Doesn’t  a crumbling highway overpass present a potential public safety issue?  Hummm…if the result is fewer highway overpasses fall on our heads, these dire financial times might not be so bad after all.

More on the AIG Bonus Babies

Here are some  legal arguments concerning the AIG bonuses, from some very knowledgeable legal scholars.

To the AIG Bonus Babies

I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but here in Boston, the mayor is asking the unions to agree to a wage freeze. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is looking a billions of dollars in a budget shortfall. Nationally, unemployment is around 8% . A lot of our industries floundering. People are downright afraid of losing their jobs, their homes, their health care. The role of the financial services industry is not to produce vast amounts of personal wealth for you Masters of the Universe types.  The  role of the financial services sector is to finance the economic growth of this country. I can’t help but notice that you guys haven’t been doing all that well lately.

They say that there is a contractual obligation to pay you your million dollar bonuses.  But you are under no obligation to accept this bonus.  In fact, maybe in refusing it, you’ll be helping to clean up a small part of the mess that you’ve help create.