TheCapeBlog

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.

This pseudo-documentary, produced by KQED in San Francisco, is just another rehash of opinions, most of them negative, about Americans born between 1946 and 1964.
Being one of the notorious Boomers, it always fascinates me that retrospectives don’t talk about the impact of the following, which were certainly a bigger part of my youth and young adulthood than Haight-Ashbury:

• The over-competitiveness in schools and colleges after Sputnik that led to breakdowns and suicides;
• Mortgage interest rates in the double digits;
• Housing as a whopping percentage of take-home pay;
• The verbal cr*p that women had to put up with simply by walking to work;
• A law enforcement system that in many parts of the country never prosecuted criminals for rape;
• Racism of Caucasians against other Caucasians because of national origin.

I am not elegiac for those days and, for whatever it’s worth, I think in many respects, especially financial, the current times are even worse for our kids.
I don’t find the Boomer phenomenon fascinating, except for the bewildering fact that advertisers seem hell-bent on ignoring our substantial purchasing power: 50% more than the coveted 18-34 market.
I don’t know many, if any, Boomers who are selfish and self-absorbed, but I know plenty who are hard-working, civic-minded and generous to their kids and parents.
As for Botox and fear of growing old: I have one friend who’s had “work done”. One.
Has to be that most of the Boomer stereotypes live in San Francisco.

… of an Interface I ever heard:
“It knows what it wants to do, but you have to tell it how.”

I’m getting better at not inviting confrontation, but sometimes it makes itself impossible to ignore.
Last week, someone whom, shall we say, I don’t consider a friend contacted me out of the blue to see if I’d be willing to loan out some fairly expensive (about $300 worth) equipment.
What made this a strange request is that she was planning to pass my property along to someone else – and consistently refused to give me his name or contact information.
She was also not willing to arrange a time/place for the three of us to meet, throwing up numerous obstacles that made no sense, like “he works during the day”.
The whole thing smelled like a scam, and I called her on it, not accusing her of dishonesty, but presumption.
I haven’t heard back from her, and just as well if I don’t.

I’ve always had a problem with defendants who plead insanity, especially in murder trials.
This item from today’s Cape Cod Times made me feel a little better:
According to a study by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2003, an insanity defense is used in less than 1 percent of all homicide cases.
Of those cases in which an insanity defense is used, fewer than 12 percent result in a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.
12 percent of 1 percent is still too many, but thank goodness it isn’t more.

According to the Carsey Institute at UNH, the gap between rich and poor from 1989 to 2004 grew faster in New England than anywhere else in the country.
This is due to what the Institute’s researchers call the “hollowing out” of the middle class, a direct result of the offshoring of manufacturing jobs.

Continue reading Income Disparity in NE

Yesterday, I bought a road TerraPass.
This program offsets the carbon dioxide emissions of vehicles, airplanes and home energy sources by funding alternative energy projects, like wind energy.
The TerraPass website calculates the emissions, then figures out the contribution needed to offset that amount of CO² pollution. For my truck, it works out to about 12,000 pounds of CO² a year, a pound per mile.
I found out about the TerraPass program at work: their hosting company is a corporate member.
A study published earlier this year estimated that servers, including cooling and auxiliary infrastructure, consume 1.2% of the total electricity in the US – about the same as color televisions.