Month: April 2007

If I were to win the lottery this weekend, I just might buy another house, a sweet waterfront cottage in Pocasset, the same village in which I work.
I’ve been restless about the neighborhood where I live now ever since I moved here over five years ago.
It’s a “family” neighborhood, which means couples, which hereabouts means if you don’t drink and/or make passes at other people’s husbands, you don’t fit in.

Continue reading My Next House

Dateline had a two-hour special on the Imus controversy last night. The program included a long segment on the Implicit Association Test, which the public can demo.
I tried it this morning and got the result “Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for African American compared to European American”.

Continue reading Implicit Association Test

An interesting article in this morning’s Boston Globe online on the other side of the illegal immigrant controversy in New Bedford: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/04/15/raid_bares_deep_divide/

An awkward question, but this is tax weekend for some of us, and going through my invoices and pay stubs, it brought to mind how very hard I worked last year. You probably did, too.
So, I was wondering whose salary, on either the State or Federal level, you resent (or don’t resent) funding with a hefty slice of the 2006 income that cost you so much blood, sweat and tears?
Here’s a list to consider:
Hillary Clinton
Barack Obama
Dr. Condolezza Rice
George W. Bush
Dick Cheney
John Kerry
Ted Kennedy
Your state rep (mine is Jeff Perry)
Your state senator (mine is Bob O’Leary)
Your governor (mine was Mitt Romney in 2005)
Well, except for Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), no one at the national level comes to mind as worthy of my life energy (= money).
Locally: I am very happy to pay Jeff Perry’s salary.
That’s two people. What’s your tally?

Delaware State Police and the Wilmington Police Department have been sued for the wrongful death of an ex-Marine who was visiting their state to participate in a Toys for Tots biker run.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/27/AR2007032702486.html

I sometimes listened to Don Imus on the way to work, especially for his interviews with high-profile political and media personalities.
I listened in spite of the ridiculous locker room conversations between him and his “boys”, men old enough to be grandparents acting like vulgar reform school wanna-be’s.
What’s surprising, then, is not that he and his pal Bernard grotesquely insulted the Rutger’s women’s basketball team. Rather, I’m amazed that anyone called him on it.
If Imus comes back from his suspension with a classier show, that would be good for everyone.
But something tells me it’s not that easy for an old dog to learn new tricks. And it’s a shame: Don Imus can be a good “listen”, politically savvy, intelligent and astute.
He felt it necessary to pander to the lowest common denominator with a craven attack on a bunch of high-performing young Black women, and that’s a shame.
One gets a sense that the man is better than that.

The Mass. Military Reservation is a gigantic piece of mostly unused land, and it’s been mentioned as a possible site for a new casino to be built and managed by the newly-recognized Wampanoag tribe of Mashpee.
What buildings exist on the MMR are for the most part the worst kind of institutional architecture. The air force base on the MMR was a victim of political payback during the Nixon years, and the fighter jets that are housed there will shortly be deployed to a location in Western Mass.

Continue reading Trading a Dump for Revenue

I was moderately surprised when my 7 year old grandson asked if we were having an Easter Egg hunt this year. Peter said they’d been talking about it “all day.”
They’ve been having egg hunts in Milton for a long time, and we started this on the Cape as well about 3 years ago. I don’t remember exactly why, maybe they had to cancel Easter dinner off-Cape, but clearly, it’s something they look forward to, regardless of the venue.
So, I set up the hunt for them late yesterday afternoon, after errands were finished: 7 eggs each, color-coded to avoid fights.
The eggs had a few pieces of candy or dimes, nothing lavish, but all 3 kids seemed to enjoy it, and Bonnie was pleased to receive the left-over chocolate.
I hear they dyed hard-boiled eggs afterwards, and wonder if they’ll attempt to eat them: maybe not.

Peter fixed my wireless network yesterday.
The problem was that rebooting the cable modem wasn’t sufficient to provision the IP address for the router.
I have phone service through the cable company, and the modem has a backup battery to keep the service from dropping in the event of a power outage. What the Comcast installer failed to tell me, but Peter figured out, is that the modem’s battery, as well as the power supply, has to be disconnected to reset the IP address.
Once that was done, Peter reconfigured my wireless devices, and now everything is sailing along.
Thank goodness.

A group of volunteers in Falmouth worked for a year to plan and raise money to build a playground at the Mullen Hall School.
They finished the six-day build yesterday, and it was quite an event.
An Ithaca NY company Leathers & Associates were the consultants. They are specialists in community playgrounds. Talk about a cool idea for a business.