Month: June 2008

I started hearing about the AFSCME/MoveOn “Alex” ad on talk radio yesterday and this morning, followed a link from Jeff Jacoby‘s column in the Globe to the ad itself.
I expected a lot from “Alex”: conservative talk show host Jay Severin characterized it as a “killer”, worth five million votes, the most effective political ad since the famous “Daisy” that some believe sunk Goldwater’s bid for the Presidency.
Instead, I found the ad a turnoff, staged and insincere. The adult female character comes across as a whining, spoiled brat exuding entitlement, as if she were an adoptive parent rubbing it in at the expense of child’s birth mother: “You can’t have him”.
Besides, as mothers of tiny children will learn to their chagrin, kids have a way of leading their own lives and making their own decisions. Warriors are born to pacifists, and the reverse. It’s part of Nature’s way.

The cicadas have migrated in force from the other side of route 151 to this neighborhood. There are dozens of exoskeletons attached to leaves on the oak tree, but unlike the gypsy moths, no apparent damage, at least not yet.
They fly around like clumsy hummingbirds; some seem to like to sit on the roof. I can hear their individual sounds, something like an “ee-yoh”. Collectively, they are deafening, although not enough to drown out conversations.
A rabbit moved in, and the other evening, it sat in the same spot for a good half hour, even ignoring a cat that had wandered into the yard.

My real estate situation is not the usual. I own a house, but don’t live there. I lease from an extended family member, who basically has been renting this place out for about half of market rate for the last ten years.
As a result, he’s lost a lot of dough and at this point, just about breaks even, so understandably, he’s not willing to put money into the house. As a result, while I have the privacy of single family home living, something I do not take for granted, I do live with a certain amount of squalor: bad windows, a deck that’s falling apart, carpets that are beyond cleaning and a chaotic back yard.

Continue reading Home, Sweet Home

I’ve been comparing notes on our Swarm XIV with one of my coworkers, who used to live in Cincinnati, which has its own 17 year cicada population.
It seems like our creatures are a good deal more considerate. They are only active during the day, and their chirps don’t sound like a chain saw but make an inoffensive white noise, similar to spring peepers.
We probably have another two weeks to go, but so far, they haven’t been as disruptive as we were led to believe.

When I lived in Marshfield, almost 9 years ago, I discovered that the local fish market gave out these trick little calendars that provided the time of sunrise and sunset.
I loved this calendar so much that after moving to the Cape, I’d make a special trip once a year to Marshfield to pick one up, usually around the winter holidays. Sometimes I’d stop in on the way back from dropping Peter off at Logan for Macworld Expo in January.
For the last couple of years, I’ve missed getting the calendar because the fish market didn’t happen to be open at the time of my visit. It wasn’t a major tragedy, but still, a modest deprivation of an ordinary pleasure, being able to easily track length of day and especially the time of sunset in the winter.
Yesterday, I was in one of the Mid-Cape Home Centers, located across the street from where I work. The cashier’s station was closed, so customers were routed to the service desk. To my surprise, there was a small supply of the very same almanac type calendars at the desk.
That means that instead of taking my chances on a long detour to Marshfield, I can just drop by a local store to pick up my annual calendar. At my convenience. Whenever I want.
It’s not a million dollars or the answer to world peace, but in my world, a good enough reason for at least a modest bit of rejoicing.

I have to admit that when I first learned of Tim Russert’s sudden passing, the thought went through my head that Mother Nature had taken her revenge : one NBC/MSNBC male chauvinist down, two to go.
My second reaction was bewilderment with the media’s preoccupation with Russert’s ethnic and religious background: he was Irish Catholic and thus, part of the wealthiest, largest and most powerful ethnic group in the United States. Okay, so what? Is that supposed to tell us something we didn’t know about Tim Russert, or is it just another example of the media’s recent obsession with religion: Obama’s Trinity United Church of Christ, Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith.
Before he jumped on the Olbermann/Matthews misogyny bandwagon, Tim Russert was someone I looked forward to seeing on Sunday mornings. Up until his red-faced reaction to Hillary Clinton (watching his last interview with Senator Clinton on Meet the Press, I honestly thought he was going to stroke), his “gotchas” seemed reasonably unbiased, and his good-humored, intelligent affliction of the comfortable was both entertaining and instructive.
His ungracious interview with Clinton and the embarrassingly mucked-up moderation of the Democratic candidate debate should have warned all of us, though, that something was seriously wrong with Tim Russert.
As it turns out, not only did he suffer from cardiovascular disease, but according to some reports, he was diabetic, an illness which is notorious for causing personality changes as well as potentially serious physical disability.
Thus, it makes me angry that the treatment Tim Russert received, the conventional “solutions” to his very common illnesses, was so ineffective, perhaps hastening his death and certainly impacting his quality of life. As a result, the public, and more importantly, his family and friends, have been deprived of his presence.
I hope the media gets that particular message.

It’s considered bad form to pepper a speech with um’s and ah’s. Then, where did the recent annoying practice of sprinkling these noises into written essays and articles come from?
I’m especially fascinated by the fact that male writers seem to be using this device, even though it reads more like baby talk than sophisticated repartee.
Consider this excerpt from a piece about the Tony awards by Time’s James Poniewozik:
Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy a good August: Osage County joke as good as the next guy who’s, um never seen the play
Given, Mr. Poniewozik is not writing about manly stuff like war or sports, but I still find this unseemly.

From Gail Collins, op-ed columnist for the NYT and not whom you’d call a strong Hillary Clinton supporter:
The passion is very intense,