fish-wrapping friday

like fish sticks in every friday's school cafeteria line while i was growing up, the eve of every weekend here in lowell is a similarly piscatological (see what i did there?) invitation for all to throw up. yup, like clockwork, my four-bit fish wrapping shows up at my door each and every friday morning, and each and every friday afternoon i am reminded how i am continually being financially raped, just like every other sun subscriber is continually being financially raped, by the bald malfeasance (see what i did there?) of the editor (or is it the publisher?) to pay a wholly unqualified and useless dinosaur of a discredited "journalist" to fill my local paper with incessant knee-jerk-offed blatherings in generally reasonless opposition to 1. deval patrick, 2. barack obama, 3. anything kennedy, and offer nothing of any possible value to the readership who otherwise is coerced into paying all the salaries. insult to injury? there is a qualified and hungry journalist out there going unpaid because of this, and there are thousands of sun readers desperate to read relevant local content left starving for same. (or desperately reading alternatives, as i am forced to do--have you checked out howl in lowell lately?)

to wit:

this week, england's prince harry found himself buck naked on the cover of his local newspaper, not to mention half the internet, which is neither news nor in any way relevant to the city of lowell. yet, somehow, this is determined to be headline stuff by our local loco-emotive, and he manages in his going-on-30 column inches (i measured) to type the word "kennedy" no fewer than 19 times. (more than one for every inch and a half of reading). not to worry, though--even though the emo-bloviator was (amazingly) unable to find room to squeeze in a "deval patrick", he was, thankfully, able to make reference to the POTUS and his secret service detail another four times, so we are at least able to congratulate him that he was able to achieve two out of his favorite three wastes of our time and money instead.

what is it going to take to stop this madness? what can possibly be done to beg (BEG) the editor and publisher of what is left of a local paper here to dump this colossal waste of space and money in favor of some ACTUAL local news? you know, at last tuesday's city council meeting, there was an impassioned discussion about the proper way to offer additional daycare options to families moving into downtown lowell. did you read about it in the sun? nope, neither did i. how many other important lowell happenings have we missed? could we ever know?

nope, not while 30" of our local journalistic real estate is covered like with so many putrid and bloody fish guts (i'm sending a note to the oxford english dictionary to include an additional alternate definition to the word "gurry"so they can remain complete) and some poor unemployed journalist is languishing flipping burgers or the like.

tell me you don't agree. everybody (and i mean everybody) i know thinks so. except campy and emperor kendall. but we can't say PL because it's already manifestly obvious he never thinks.

if only we all could get jobs writing "deval/barry/anything kennedy sucks" for a living... i'm thinking we'd all do a far more interesting job of it.

edited to add: in this same issue of the sun, there is a small AP piece (well less than 30 column inches) detailing the apparent suicide of a man named chris lighty in new york. who is chris lighty, you ask? well, i'll tell you it's more than ironic that a man my age disposed of my type of musical tastes would know anything at all about this this incident or anything at all about this man before his story was picked up by my local paper--he's a "hip hop" mogul, and a NY one at that. but did the sun have anyone on staff who understood the personal connection of this story to one of lowell's top music promoters (four folk-fest weekend "uptown music and arts festivals" to his credit among uncounted numbers of other events at almost every major venue in this city) and media personalities (until recently when it sold out, the morning DJ on the top and most influential alternative radio station in the metro boston area and possibly the country) and musicians? (most recently a new england music award winner among many other accolades, and we won't even get into the comedy awards and performances--that would seem gratuitous).  but, back to our question:  of course not--they're paying and printing the loco-emo-bloviator instead. d-tension won't make a big deal of his own accomlishments and his own credits, but if you get a chance, ask him what chris lighty meant to him and his career, and what chris has done for music and culture in this great country of ours. you'll hear a heartfelt and sincere homage to a remarkable man. it would be something a local paper would be proud to publish, but, as you can see, we don't really have a local paper. we have something quite piscatologically different...

sad all around.

you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your family

i've thought long and hard about this one.

a family member (in-law, not blood) i maintained (past tense) as a "friend" (ironic, huh) on facebook today (yeah, i know) linked a video from a pedantic religious "scholar" (irony abounds) expounding on homosexuality's lack of place in "christianity" (like i said, irony abounds). his logic was, if i might be so bold and so ill-advised to bother to paraphrase, that, unlike opposition to something like racism, (racism standing only to offend what is sacred, i.e. a person's race which is given to them by god and cannot be changed), opposition to homosexuality, (homosexuality standing only to offend what is sacred, i.e. the bible saying that only hetero sex within marriage is ok, and all else, including masturbation, is an abomination), is cool. the pedant (funny how pedant is so close to pederast in the dictionary, isn't it) expressed an analogy between acting on homosexual urges and acting on infidelous heterosexual ones, saying that just the same way that married guys shouldn't have sex with anyone else other than a (female) wife, homosexual guys shouldn't have sex with anyone else other than a (female) wife, either. this way, he assures us, we can still love everybody, even while we take quotes from a badly-translated 2000 year old book over everything we as human beings have come to learn about the essence of homosexuality being, like race, something basic to who we are. (and who, by the way, pedant preachers, is clearly spelled out in that book to be god's image, even though you seem to see no irony in accepting one part of your "sacred" text, while ignoring another).

anyway, the depth of this crock of bullshit has caused me to do two things, and anticipate doing a third. the first is hitting the "unfriend" button on facebook so as to avoid having to be reminded of how, though you can pick your friends, you can't pick your family, and nobody says you have to be facebook friends with your family. the second is writing this little expression of let-off steam, to try to repair my karma to the universe for having been civil to this horse's ass (my brother-in-law) for all these years despite the evil incarnate within him and expressed so hatefully onto the world. (i have compelling examples of his behavior over the years i am more than willing to share in a more discreet forum--i'm not trying to pile on here, just assure you that i don't say the word evil about another human being lightly). and the third is being clear with this horse's ass about my perspectives on this topic over a family meal so as to become a better man in the eyes of my children, who, i am proud to say, have always been way ahead of me on this one. they knew it then, know it now, and i'm sure are in no danger whatsoever of forgetting, and will only want to know why it took their father so long to stop making excuses for this hateful, hurtful and pathetic man i have always told them they should like more than they do.

i do get the reason he felt compelled to express his hate. i do understand why "religion" compels otherwise rational human beings to insist upon the irrational. we've had the inquisition, and we continue to have hateful, hurtful nonsense like this today. we'll have it long into the future. but i refuse to stand mute in honor of Niemöller's poetry and jesus' better example, and i'm resolved to try to shine my own light instead of hiding it under a bushel of cowardice. the bible? exodus explains it's cool to sell women into sexual slavery. leviticus details the price. numbers says what you can do with them (or those captured as spoils of war, after all the males and non-virgin females are executed, of course). and deuteronomy gives the word on exceptions in cases of "no delight". (making a guy wonder if the deflowered property should go back to the execution pool, or the desert?) and this is all from the "good book" we're supposed to use as a guidebook on what to do with gays???

god's image, people. if you have to go back to any bible verse, please, let's go back to this one. homosexuality, race, gender and a whole host of other things we have contrived to justify enslavement and killing are all THE WAY WE ARE. god's image. we're pissing in his eye to hate and be intolerant of any and all of it. of that i am sure. (though i know, mr pedant, you are not). and let me be clear about my beliefs--i believe that nobody adhering to any religion has to believe in doing anything they don't feel in their "religious" heart to be right. nobody's gonna make anybody marry a gay guy. but i'll be damned if any of that gets mistaken for cramming hateful, hurtful and immoral standards down the throat of any one of god's innocent creatures, or passes ever again without a word from me.

no, i don't feel it's my place to judge or to preach, only to stand up for what is right.

thanksgiving dinner is gonna be a doozy this year.

i truly feel sorry for rational republicans, and i feel most of all sorry for all of us

sam bee's piece linked below (the temporally preceding post, yet the following one in blog order) is a stunning piece of cinema verite. expressing their insistence on mitt romney's prerogative to decide for himself his position on abortion, these unwitting (for that is exactly and literally what they are--unwitting) party lemmings are articulating exactly why their platform should not be forced onto the population at large. yet they, in their ignorance (yes, weeks after akin's ignorance was roundly and profoundly repudiated from all sources and sides, this woman in the video STILL swears women are almost never impregnated as a result of rape) cannot find the wit or the ken to see the staggering and stunning flaw to their illogic, and that they are so easily able to articulate the simple and compelling reason why their proposal can never be right for this country.

i truly feel sorry for rational republicans.

while reasonable and responsible people, capable of cogent and compelling thought, are vying to stand against the extreme and sordid excesses and illegalities of the present administration, any hope that their points will be heard, let alone respected, is washed into the gulf of mexico like so many south louisiana sharecroppers shacks, pitifully unable to withstand the hurricane surge tide of idiocy and inanity with which the apparent majority of their party remains insistent to blather and drown the (our) country.

the case against barry o is open and shut, and compelling. rather than change, he continued dubya's treasury-busting and best-and-brightest-sacrificing-for-nothing wars, and added at least two new ones of his own. rather than change, he extended and expanded the immoral and unconstitutional "patriot" act (it still galls me to the point of choking that such a proud word should have been whored out for this mephitic, steaming pile of bullshit) along with a litany of expanded and newly-initiated executive orders that, among many other terrifying things, enable the administration to pursue, detain, torture and even kill citizens of the united states without due process, and they won't even deny that they'll do it right here on american soil if they feel like it. rather than change, he compounded the fiscal irresponsibility leftover from his profoundly irresponsible predecessor and presided over the largest ballooning of the national debt in the entire history of this now-bankrupt country. (for, yes, there is no question to anyone with a passing understanding of accounting and unfunded liabilities that we are, indeed, already bankrupt even though our creditors have not yet started to call in their notes--but you know they will). yet, he still remains, after all that, so obviously rational and sane compared with the braying mob of asses (irony that the GOP symbol isn't the jackass instead of the elephant) that would be the largest contingent in opposition to him. and so we all lose.

we ALL lose.

republicans of any intelligence and sense lose first of all--there is no defending these statements that flood over the airwaves like so much of isaac's surge over the levees of louisiana, and they are left to be considered idiots for associating with such, and, frankly, i'm telling you right here and right now that these otherwise intelligent and sensible republicans deserve to be thrown out with that baby's bathwater. the statements are absolutely indefensible. absolutely.

but most of all, we ALL lose. we should be repudiating the present administration and rushing it out of office as quickly as we can. it has done what walter sobchak would characterize as fucking a stranger in the ass, and watch here for what walter knows should be done to anyone who would fuck a stranger in the ass. (fifteen year old daughter rule, and i could not be more proud that she absolutely understands the true meanings of the expressions here, and the politics to which they refer). barry obama and his administration has been fucking this country in the ass for going on four years. enough ought to be enough.

but it's not, because these are the voices of the opposition.

sad.

wow

sometimes amidst the avalanche of disposable and forgettable media dreck, somebody finds themselves able to put together a piece that makes you stop and say "wow". this is that kind of piece. watch it. listen to it. it'll amaze you. it did me.

zoning out

tonight's city council meeting agenda contains an item that would redefine "acceptable alternate use" in residential zones, including residentially zoned private condominium buildings downtown and everywhere else in the city. as you should hopefully know by now, i live in one of those white elephants myself, and so have a somewhat biased axe to grind on this one. (you can skip this is you'd rather not hear it ;-)

anyway, the asterisk that shall become relevant later on, (so put a bookmark in this one), is that condominium master deeds generally contain language that restrict unit ownership to residential use, while additionally containing language intended to protect ownership property rights to the extent of local residential zoning. i think the lazy lawyer theory (also the efficient lawyer theory) is that it's best to skip spelling things all out when you can just refer to city ordinances that do the same thing--residential is residential, right?--and you can thus be better assured not to run in conflict with those city ordinances.

ah, the best intentions of mice and men...

so, fast forward to today: a lawyer married to a would-be businessperson has filed a motion that would have the city council specifically allow commercial (i.e. for fee) daycare operation in residential areas. to most suburban or even city neighborhood folks living in single-unit dwellings, this isn't all that big a deal or onerous--single-unit dwellings tend to have their own means of ingress and egress, sufficient space for pickup and drop-off of the little cherubs who are the object of that commerce, and all sorts of other circumstances that make it often ok to say "ok" to a neighbor's wish to pick up some spare cash by watching folks' kids for money. oh, and folks in single unit dwellings pay for their own liability insurance.

however, when the residence is a multi-unit dwelling, lots of things change.

big condo buildings do not have private means of ingress and egress. anyone given access to the building for one unit has just been given access to the building for all units. big condo buildings do not have sufficient space for pickup and drop-off of little cherubs (our citizens most vulnerable to traffic mishaps in parking lots) let alone sufficient space for the other owners themselves. (my building, for example, pays for a significant portion of the population to park their cars at the leo roy garage because they don't fit in the tight little area we have around the building). in fact, there are a litany of circumstances that make a pack of little kids doing exactly what a pack of little kids does a significant hardship to the apartment neighbors of an apartment trying to conduct "in-home" i.e. for profit commercial daycare, from noise to property damage to other nuisances. and last but absolutely not least, owing to the joint liability insurance required to be carried by every condominium association, the introduction of watched-for-fee children to the building also introduces exposure to lawsuits based on abuse, neglect, negligence and a host of other big-ticket civil judgment items that insurance companies have learned cost people billions of dollars each and every day.

yeah, yeah, any licensed and properly zoned provider has to carry their own insurance, but that insurance doesn't remediate assaults, vandalism and theft carried out by additional people able to access the building in other areas of that building. (tell me dozens of new strangers entering and exiting at least twice a day doesn't add to the exposure). it also doesn't solve the problem of where to put all the cars and careening toddlers (my building's parking lot is already improperly used by patrons of the daycare outfit next door and is a daily keystone kops highlight reel of almost tragedy, and we're not even talking about this being right in the shadow of marshal field's little decaying building folly) while everyone with the actual right to use that space is trying to get to and from work at the same time. and it absolutely does not stop the commercial insurance provider of the association overall from jacking up the association's premiums and putting that cost onto the backs of all the other owners who are not being paid for the danger or the inconvenience.

residential zoning is residential zoning, not commercial. for-fee daycare is commercial use. having that commercial use in a residentially-zoned condominium (multi-unit) building is an unfair hardship on other owners who paid for their property under the presumption that such use would not be allowed. changing those rules after the fact to augment the purse of certain owners at the expense of all others is unfair.

maybe the city council will take the zoning board's recommendation and reject the motion. maybe the city council will respect the logic above and amend the proposal to restrict such use in multi-unit buildings. (which would not satisfy the petitioners--they want to jam a for-profit daycare operation into a residential building despite the hardship they would be forcing on their neighbors). maybe the city council will do something else.

but i sincerely hope the city council will not capriciously and arbitrarily reward for-profit commercial use of any building at the expense of its residential neighbors, all of whom bought and paid for their properties under the assumption that such use would not be allowed.

anyway, if you want to see me on tv, just tune into tonight's meeting when i reiterate same. for those recalling the bookmark above, please understand that this is a pervasive problem throughout the city, because almost all condo associations refer to local zoning to define "acceptable alternate use". changes to condo association master deeds generally require certified, notarized ratification by two thirds of their ownership, and all the proper legal preparation of new documents and filing at the local registry of deeds. (thankfully registration is at least optimized by our ace register of deeds, dick howe, so there's that going for us, and if you don't have a good reason why, subscribe yourself to lowelldeeds.blogspot.com to read for yourself). but the expense and effort is extensive and arduous, and not trivial, in order to once again assert that only residential use is intended by the owners of these associations, like myself, who have no interest in having our expenses increased and our property values decreased for the profit of another and their zoning-rule-savvy lawyer.

seriously--if they felt so strongly about the appropriateness of such use in the condo building where they want to set up shop, they could just have their neighbors with them amend that one master deed and everybody would be happy.  but they can't, because their neighbors are dead set against them doing it, so these chiselers are taking it out on the entire city through the loophole enabled by city council fiat over the residential zoning bylaws which gives them that legal back door into condominium association master deeds.

not cool.

dirtier politics

national political conventions have long been becoming precarious mutations of an age-old and improvised smoke-filled-room tradition, morphed into a scripted and now fully hash-tagged made-for-tv infomercial. yet they have always been, at least, somewhat honest affairs at their core, which would be the state delegations in significant part chosen at the grassroots level from those who put the most skin into the press-the-flesh game.

until (maybe) now. check this out.

mittington obamney's lawyers have proposed a rule change to the republican party convention, which the rules committee is inclined to endorse, that would allow a national candidate to hand-pick state delegates to suit him or herself. what, might you say, is the real problem here, since convention delegates are committed via their state's caucus or primary selection process to cast their (first) ballots for that candidate. (the proposal is only to be able to replace those already committed to that candidate by caucus or primary election). but, see, there's the point.

ron paul, though unsuccessful in capturing a plurality of delegates that would otherwise require a protracted nomination process at the national convention, has been exceptionally successful (as in exceptionally successful) in recruiting active and loyal convention delegates from his supporters who, though honor bound to vote for mittington on that fateful first ballot, would otherwise be free to plump for their boy should things ever get to a second ballot. (you know, that old smoke-filled-room dinosaur thing). and that's something that absolutely terrifies the party apparatchiks--imagine! a convention actually reflecting the opinions of its delegates! so they want to make sure that everything sticks to the script they will be dutifully tweeting non-stop from tampa, and give national candidates the imprimatur to replace whomever they fear might become guilty of thinking for themselves and nip that whole "democracy" thing in the bud.

yup, they want to make sure that the only smoky room that chooses their nominee is the one which is already properly bought and paid for by their super pacs and other big money donors before the convention even begins. (your democracy dollars at work, and mine, too, observing that me and everyone else pays for private party primary elections out of the public purse, which is something that is long since overdue for redress--if you want to use public resources to elect a private candidate, then you ought to have to pay for it. period. right?)

anyway, i'm not trying to suggest the democrats would be any different under similar circumstances. i'm trying to suggest that this is dirtier politics than ever from the republican wing of the single party system under which we are now being robbed and raped, and that if i had a vote to give, i'd give it to the texas delegation rising up as one to fight the power where they can.

earning your way to a national political convention should not be something that can be confiscated.

then again, i'm not a republican...

i wonder what cliff thinks...

edited to add that compromise language has been agreed today that specifies penalties for not voting as otherwise bound by a state caucus or primary election, but successfully averts the power of a national campaign to select individual state delegates. seems like a fair compromise to me, but, like i said, i'm not a republican...

facecrooks

techcrunch.com does a great job of highlighting the less than ethical ways (you can quote me) FB now enables "apps" to get your permission to "post on your behalf". (all without ever really informing you clearly into what you're getting yourself). as we all need to remain aware, on facebook, WE are the product, and the advertisers are the customers. (think of it as a voluntary privacy slaughterhouse, where the cows/us walk right into the abattoir). if someone offers you to add an "app", DON'T. i know it's tempting. but just don't. i can't tell you how many of my friends' names now appear on the right hand advertising bar whenever i'm logged in, associated with everything from walmart to dodgy soft porn sites (and more women with the latter than i think you or they might want to believe). it's an ever-emerging iceberg, and i fear many of my friends are already on a collision course with a titanic moment, when something comes back to heavily damage if not sink their life's ocean liner. (you do know every prospective employer now uses FB to check you out, right?)

and, while we're at it, if you're looking for a useful outfit to "like" on FB, i'd highly recommend "facecrooks". (they're the outfit that pointed me to the techcrunch article). only one of my friends has, and i cannot for the life of me understand why. it's a daily wealth of important, useful and illuminating information on everything facebook. if you can find a better source, tell me, please. PLEASE. because i want to know.

and, if you're wondering: yes, going on 30 years in software has absolutely taught me to be the way i am. seriously--if you get into a rocket ship and the astronaut beside you puts on his seatbelt and points to something and says "don't touch that", you better believe i'm the first guy buckling up and staying 100 miles away from whatever "that" is. online privacy is more complex and inscrutable than rockets are. rockets crash. your online persona/identity is far more vulnerable.

be safe. buckle up. wear a helmet.

true story

i attended my soccer league's annual meeting (we're up to 268 teams--largest league in the world until someone proves different) and had opportunity to hear a story from a couple of the older horses in the room about a well-known guy who (ironically) now participates as a referee. seems a few years back, while he was still playing, he had earned a well-deserved reputation for boundary-pushing violence. (think of rodney harrison going to nfl referee school for an imperfect analogy). well, anyway, the payoff to this particular series of stories was about the ultimate game of his playing career, during which he had taken down an opposing player with completely unreasonable and injurious force.  he had escaped the deserved consequence of a red card and consequent 1-game suspension by the inaction of the referee, but instead of the usual escalation of unpleasantry that would have otherwise sprung from the righteous indignation of the victim's teammates, instead the misbehaving player's teammates acted first and pre-emptively to hound the offender from the field with not only the insistence that he leave that game, but also that he never play with them again. (in fact, to a man, they refused to ever take the field with him, and wrote him a letter during the following week that if he showed up to the next game, they would walk off the field and forfeit instead of bearing the shame of having him as a teammate).  true story.

anyway, i can't help but think of todd akin's inexcusable assault upon the victims of rape this past week, and the question as to what degree other republicans deserve coincident culpability. i'd like to offer two salient points, if i may. (people are still talking about this, so why should i consider myself better than anyone else?) first of all, like joe paterno, if one of your guys does wrong, it's on you to bear responsibility for his place in your organization. second of all, like everyone seems to forget, this insistence that victims of rape be raped a second time by a government confiscation of their right to remain in control of their own body has been part of the republican party platform for DECADES, and was not invented by this one particular and dangerous idiot. required viewing should be rachel maddow's (i know, i know) recap of the history of "you can't get pregnant if you get raped" within the republican party (viewable here) in which she recounts a stunning litany of nonsense of akin's proportion and beyond. (notable being the number of these folks appointed to be federal judges and etc.).  seriously--watch it for as long as you can stand it--it's good for you.

short answer is, yes, if you're a republican, you DO bear responsibility for akin's comments for these reasons and more. scott brown satisfied his responsibility by saying "as a husband and father of two young women, i found todd akin’s comments about women and rape outrageous, inappropriate and wrong. tere is no place in our public discourse for this type of offensive thinking. not only should he apologize, [which he has], but i believe rep. akin’s statement was so far out of bounds that he should resign the nomination for US senate in missouri.” i measure all others by the presence or absence of similar statements in the public record.

we all should.

if he's on your team, his behavior IS your team's responsibility, and yours for your being part of it.  someone else may have said it and done it, but you still need to do the right thing.

serial storytelling

dickens was the master, and when you consider it was all done with quill and ink, (i.e. no cut and paste or spellcheck), "required reading" like great expectations takes on a whole different retrospective aura. (i still hated it while faced with it for the first time--every high school student does). being able to tie up loose ends in a story (magwitch rocks) while making it up as you go along is a special talent, and jj abrams (lost, yo) absolutely does NOT have it. (vince gilligan, producer of amc's breaking bad quite possibly does--i read the other day how his original concept was to have jesse killed off by the end of the first season, but the adaptation to build the main narrative tension around jesse's moral ascendance and walt's ultimate corruption is becoming complete, and it's as rich a story as the 35mm cinematography is stunning for basic cable tv).

anyway, i'm finding our critical need for coherent media narrative to be just as intense, but, i think, shakespeare had something when he had cassius admonish brutus about the fault being in ourselves. the reason there can be no sensible resolve to the akins affair is that there is no sense in it at all in the first place. we continue to be represented by a host of todd akins and walter whites, all perhaps once of good moral intention and fiber, but descended through the greedy hell of our money politics into craven disciples of absolute nonsense. (at least in walter's case he's not a stupid man...) julian assange's new digs at the ecuadorian embassy are positively lost-ian in their improbability and overwhelming ambiance of "so what?", and his arrogant public pronouncements now that he's once again thinking himself to be beyond reprisal would make more interesting copy if they weren't so hackneyed after all these months. yeah, we get it, information wants to be free, but, seriously, dude, you need to get a better publicist.

because that's where we are now. everything has to be scripted, and the ones with the best screenwriters get to make all our new rules. it's insipid and it's stupid and we're the ones to pay for our insatiable appetite for serial storytelling, but, well, that's the democracy h l mencken suggested we ask to get good and hard, and, i have to say, we're certainly getting that and more these days.

sure would be a better place if we were to be able to see past ourselves...

the island

i spent a good number of hours since last october playing a silly little iphone game that lets players manage control of a bunch of cities in an island world populated by all the other players managing control of a bunch of cities in an island world populated by... (i think you get the recursivity...)

anyway, in this little island world, you build yourself up via the resources you gain through either production or conquest or some mix of both, and you lose even more quickly when other players choose to take the conquest route at your expense. and, given that, except for the lucky first players of the game some unknown time ago, everybody else starts out bigger than you, and very much able to loot the living daylights out of your cities unless and until you join up with a group of other larger players who are able to intimidate them from trying (or otherwise loot the living daylights out of their cities in retaliation), your success or failure in the game is directly correlated to the quality of your political association.

as in life, the little island world is populated by nice folks and not so nice folks and most definitely a lot of the same breed of asshole that you will meet often in this real world of ours. some players would choose their association based purely on its size and strength, and suffer any and all number of assholes to be part of that, figuring that might, even if it doesn't make right, still makes you and your little collection of cities stronger. being a bit older than the average islander, (you know my age group is not generally part of the key demographic for little silly iphone games like this one), i reflected for a moment, and chose differently based on my suspicion that assholes will be as assholes do, and that the long run best course for anyone's cities would be to refuse to associate with such. so i joined a small but highly respectful and respectable crew of like-minded (older) folks who did our collective best to overcome our smaller size and resulting vulnerability at the hands of the most predatory.

well, as they say, age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill, and time proved a certain point: the associations who rejected and expelled boorish asshole members were weakened in the short term by the loss of such strength, but they were ultimately vindicated (mine rose to the top of the power charts, thank you very much) when the assholes in the big crews invited retaliation for their noisome expressions of self, (and by noisome i do not mean loud, and look it up if you don't know exactly what i mean), and the collected works of karma came back to haunt their efforts.

i wonder if the republican and democrat political parties haven't lost the point. akins is an asshole of profound proportions. so why isn't he repudiated loudly and expelled from his party? sure, he's an office holder with supporters and all that, but, in the long run, i'm quite sure the cumulative negative effect on republicans for his having been a party member is going to be far bigger than whatever support he can offer "the cause". (and we don't have to go very far to find democrat examples, either, so let's not be confused that this is some sort of a partisan discussion). sure, everybody will become distracted by what might be fair means to determine what the line might be and when someone will have crossed it, but i'm talking about people who are held of beliefs and given to behavior that is so damaging that they are better off out than in, and we all, like that judge said about smut, recognize it when we see it.

but, like on the island, most folks will choose to go down with their teammates rather than tighten up the ship in time to save it (and themselves in the process).

let's just say, as long as guys like todd akins play for the yankees, i mean, the republicans, i'm gonna be rooting for anybody and everybody else, and, yes, i do vote.

edited to add: i make no secret of my affinity for many "libertarian" points of view. i think the lesson goes double for that particular small party most frequently trampled by the dance of the donkeys and elephants. ask most anyone not in that party, and they'll tell you they consider the libertarian party and their policies to be too much populated by crackpots and crazy ideas to be supported let alone joined. so, yeah, they're small and need every hand on every oar they can get, but, see, it's indulging the assholes and their nutty opinions that will ultimately break (or by not indulging, make) them as a political party. choose your friends wisely, my friends.

your crew

bear with me through the following expression of unfair prejudice and hate, but a lot of red sox fans don't care much for yankee fans, and i think it's because, for one thing, old towne teamers don't care much for the yankees at all, nor do they care much for a lot of the other yankee fans they've met in the process of earning their opinion. which is not to say beantowners won't meet a legit yankee fan every once in awhile who has supported the team since the 60's and 70's when they sucked, and who isn't just a loud, boorish, front-running, bandwagon-jumper-onner with a preference for ridiculing others, that they can respect. but when bahstin boosters do meet such a legit yankee fan, i'm sorry to say that said yankee fan does generally have to pass a certain amount of close questioning before the soxers are willing to even listen to, let alone respect, the bronx baseball point of view. (i told you it was an expression of unfair prejudice and hate...)

well, anyway, most yankee fans i meet don't like boston fans much, either. from the pinstriped point of view, those red B folks are the very body and insufferable soul of the boorish, front-running and bandwagon-jumper-onner sox crowd they've long known and despised, and tell me you haven't met plenty of sox fans who enjoy ridiculing fans of other teams and deserve every insult they get.

which is all to say, fair is fair, and we all get stained by our associations. when you're at a party with the loudest, most obnoxious asshole there, and you do nothing to moderate, mitigate or otherwise shield the rest of the crowd from the worst of his or her asshole behavior, then you're fairly considered to be associatively culpable, and exactly like him or her only less obvious about it. either way, and you should face it--nobody is going to like you, and nobody is going to go home with you no matter how charming you might otherwise be.

which brings us to the question today of what might constitute "legitimate" rape, and why it is that, should you be a rightie today, every leftie you know (and especially all the ones you don't) are going to hate you with a renewed and legitimate passion to the extent that you do or don't attempt to moderate, mitigate or otherwise shield the rest of the world from the worst of todd akin's black-hearted and pointlessly ignorant political views.

i am too lazy, and too respectful to all victims of all rapes to find and cite medical evidence attesting to the rate of pregnancy involved in all sorts, because akin's black-hearted ignorance deserves no such respect or effort. just please let it suffice to say that every rightie pundit with a "liberal media" complaint should just shut it and zip it for a good long time now because that blooper is so bald and so putrid that unless they're all over my television and web feed with denouncements and apologies, their opinions mean nothing to me at all.

yeah, i know, a lot of righties will feel like the sheer ignorance of the comments should be enough to hold them innocent. (seriously, who could possibly believe such a thing?) but, see, you righties came to the party with that asshole, and we all know it. so you're either going to tell him to shut up yourself and never let him hang with you again, or we're all going to know you're just an enabling and approving stooge to it all.

because that right there thing that he said? that's over the top.

the reviews are in

voices rock club in centralville rocks. the arte k band followed by peter lavender and the limbo souls completely rocks and rocks. and gary's joint is pouring harpoon IPA out of the tap for three dollars and seventy-five cents which absolutely rocks and rocks and rocks--yes, i had three, and bought at least three more for other people because it was there and because i could and because lowell is the best walking place on earth.  livingston who?

you never know where a reasoned discussion will break out

here's something i wrote in response to a surprisingly reasonable discussion on facebook on the recent license commission firings. you'll note that it includes odd things like capital letters, but please forgive me that i do sometimes give into convention while expositing on other media. (and the bit about ray and the backup singers at the back page is an inside joke i can explain if anyone needs an explanation, but it's not consequential to the discussion). so here it is:

I am not sure I'm ready for the consequences of jumping in at this late stage of the "discussion", but I showed up to be one of Ray's backup singers at the Back Page the other night, so I'm already bought into a piece of this already.

So,

first of all, with all due hyperbole and emotion (and sarcasm): "Who appointed these people???"

Second of all, let's agree on one thing: The License Commission, by not acting on any of the points proposed to them, was, at best, politically irresponsible. I disagree with Ray's interpretation of open meeting bylaw requirements and his suggestion it wasn't appropriate to approve a subset of the proposals at that meeting, and I will point out that if the Commission had moved on certain points (like requiring TIPS certification for all servers in the city) it would have been far less politically possible to the point of impossibility for the City Manager to ostensibly fire two of the commissioners for disagreeing with him. But they did not, so here we are.

The larger point on the table, even forgetting the disrespect to commission independence and their professional judgment constituted by the city manager's move to fire two people he appointed in the first place, is that we have some proposed regulations that in some important cases go too far, but in many cases deserve incorporation into our city's licensing rules. Weicker and Bayliss (and Akashian by not moving a smaller subset of the proposed rules) did more to damage the business climate by refusing to act at all than I'm sure they intended. But throwing babies out with bathwater and moving on a populist agenda to throw more rules on top of a process that can't even enforce the ones we have is crazy.

We have rules to stop underage drinking, overserving, and literally ALL the establishment-related contributions to "downtown disorder". We are here not because we don't have enough rules, but because we had a license commission that could not find the basis to properly enforce the ones we had. Ray will say the LPD did not bring them the right actionable cases, and he may very well be correct. But let's all then agree that the License Commission did very little (next to nothing) to work with police to bring stricter enforcement of existing rules against the establishments in the city who were bending and breaking them.

My hope is that the new appointees (or Wally if he survives his hearings) take that to heart, and start with an experiment in stricter enforcement before they give into implementation of some extremely flawed rules which will no more solve the problems than the previous ones did if nobody finds a fair and consistent way to apply them.

my tin foil hat

i don't know why i google these things...

remember that little brouhaha over whether it was the noaa fisheries people or the weather service who had ordered those 46,000 hollow point bullets, i.e. bullets that are used never for target practice, and always for taking down human beings, not uncoincidentally in conflict with the geneva convention? (that's right, the us army can't use 'em). well, those 46,000 hollow point rounds for game wardens and weather stationeers is just the tip of that iceberg. the social security administration ordered 176,000 hollow point rounds. the us department of agriculture ordered 326,000 rounds. the department of homeland security ordered 450 MILLION rounds. (for scale, consider that the us army expends about 5.5 million rounds during an average month in iraq and afghanistan, meaning that DHS is now armed for 7 years of actual war).

back in the old days, they called it "REX 84", and it was a government blueprint for martial law. these days it goes by the NSDP51 (national security defense protocol) and HSDP20 (homeland security defense protocol) monickers, and it includes over three thousand detention / "civilian labor" camps to receive all those so designated by the government without due process according to the powers granted under the patriot act.

yup, our government is armed for 7 years of fighting against its own citizens, using ammunition not allowable in international conflict by the rules of the geneva convention, including forced detention and labor camps (nowhere in my reading of the government sites did i see the word "concentration", but i couldn't help but be reading it nonetheless) and targeted assassination.

but, of course, you will say that i'm crazy. our government would never do that.

so why do they need all that ammo???

if time either stood still, or if people had actual memories

i'm going to take some liberties with transcribing a blog post from some point in our nation's history that you are free to try to guess, (as in i'm going to change an extremely small number of words to protect the innocent), and then i'm going to link the actual blog post, and see if reading my version here, and then reading the blog version after will give you any pause for thought. it's about a murderer claiming to have political motivation, and it's highly relevant to the state of our current national discourse, and it goes something like this:

People who walk into random businesses or public places and open fire on innocents usually aren’t disposed to rational discourse or long-term planning, but the recent shooting of a doctor at a Witchita abortion clinic (allegedly accompanied by his declaration of “I don’t like your politics”) will surely do nothing but backfire. This wasn’t just needlessly violent and intolerably destructive – it will also prove to have been actively counterproductive.

The clinic and those who share its goals won’t hesitate to exploit this incident to portray themselves as the real victims in their ongoing fight against innocent lives. David C. Nice is already at it, demanding that murderous child-killing groups no longer be called “murderous” or “child-killing” because apparently that will cause people to shoot them (raising the question of why exactly it took so long for that to happen even once). I fully expect that he will continue bringing this up for the foreseeable future whenever they find it convenient to make supporters of Christian groups look like maniacs who want to kill them – which is to say, always.

And every single time they milk this for more sympathy, we’ll be obliged to recite ad nauseam that yes, we unambiguously deplore all violence, no, this is never an acceptable approach to civil debate in the public sphere, yes, this was a terrible tragedy and our hearts go out to the victim, no, this man does not represent what we stand for… and so on. Meanwhile, they’ll continue working to murder our unborn, ridicule our faith, and fight tooth and nail against our values at every step. And now, they’ll be forcing us to apologize along the way.

You wounded more than just one person yesterday at that clinic, Mr. Shooter.

ok, and now link here to read the actual post.


i'm dumbfounded at the complete lack of perspective both "conservatives" and "liberals" seem to have for their own malformed reason, and i'm terrified that both are so rabidly convinced of the inhumanity of their opponents to go along with it. the result is an electorate incapable of reasoned compromise, and an ongoing parade of warmonging, debt-sotted ideologues bent on destroying this nation in a whip-saw gavotte that's really just a garotte around our collective throats. the patriot act that dubya created and barry doubled-down to renew? it's a pure wet-dream for the head of a totalitarian state. (we won't even mention the nearly half a billion rounds of hollow-point ammunition stockpiled by our government recently, that's enough to fight several of our previous world wars, and the three thousand seven hundred and sixty-eight "detention camps" that are now visible via google earth, and you can google "REX 84" and "NSDP51" and "HSDP20" for details of our "civilian inmate labor program" and preparations for "civilian prison camps" that are outlined in existing executive branch plans in case it becomes convenient to declare martial law in case you think i'm making any of this stuff up). the foreign wars in which we continue to be entangled? (a raft of new service deaths this week--were you paying attention?) forgetting the fact that they're unconstitutional and causing the deaths of civilians at a horrific pace, (i can't say "innocent civilians" because it's been commented here from one ideological standpoint that only children can be unequivocally be claimed as innocents in these conflicts), they're a giant money-suck that's draining our treasury at an alarming rate, and leaving us vastly and ironically weakened in the process. that federal reserve that fights tooth and nail to remain above congressional audit? it's an historically unprecedented factory of churned out fiat money and insider dealing that's enabling the greatest theft of public funds in the history of the world, and leaving our next generation with a monetary system that is unsustainable and obvious for collapse.

yeah, i sound like a paranoid lunatic now, but, see, that's what happens when you stand in the middle while both sides scream their partisan lunacy at each other, and insist on successively more extreme central powers so that one side or the other (because you know the only way this ends is with one side under the boot heel of the other) can "restore order".

know what? we need to get off this train. the bridge is out ahead, and both the d's and the r's and their respective armies of righteous indignants are putting more coal on.

monsoons and most places 0, good beer and good music 1

i didn't get handed springsteen tickets for fenway last night like somebody i know, (imagine a jersey girl whose never seen springsteen the bruce before), but i scored big with prime seats for treat her right at passim. you know passim--the coffee house in cambridge that reeks so profoundly of stale patchouli and excess estrogen that, out of at least 50 photographs on the walls of the place, 47 of them are of little women with acoustic guitars. well, i'm here to say that, at least once, the cathedral that joan of baez built has been well and properly rocked. (completing the cross-river irony, and, yeah, that's a westchester county vs jersey joke, passim even brags that it once refused to let springsteen play on its stage). anyway, treat her right turned a slow burn into a volcanic inferno, and by the time the boys left the stage with the echoing reverberations of "back to sin city" the whole place, patchouli sisters of the traveling veggie burgers and all, was on its feet and pounding for more. and then they did i've got a gun at full hollow-point body shot bore, and tore the roof off the place. a GREAT night.

but this really isn't about that--it's about driving back to lowell through a biblical monsoon to drop off the kids (yes, grampa put all those thirty-and-forty-somethings to bed before heading back out to see what was up in downtown lowell) and being struck by how completely the rain had dampened the usual wednesday nightlife spirits around the neighborhood. the "blue collar beer" bars were all down to a few doughty regulars from market to merrimack, nursing who knows what sort of bland and tasteless swill, and i was figuring i'd wander into a couple bedraggled open-mikers re-trashing their favorite pop songs to a half-empty house over at the back page because someone here has told me that that place is never gonna make it offering real music and more than just budweiser...

so, first of all, i see a big knot of people smoking their cigarettes under their umbrellas along the walkway overlooking the canal. could everyone in the place be outside at the same time? and then i turn the corner of the doorway to step inside, and i'm looking at a full house like its a saturday night, and the energy is pulsating so you can feel it in your ears. i'm willing to bet their bar moved more money last night than the next five downtown, and the vast majority of that would have been on $5 beers to boot. (i did see one guy drinking a bud light, but, then again, larry does that most every week). the joint was jumpin.

my personal highlight was, after sliding into the banquette booth at the back and being handed my usual and tasty harpoon IPA--pearl you make me love you, being awakened to the what i'll swear to you was the note-for-note instrumental (here's nancy rocking it out on bert sugarman's midnight special back in '77) from "crazy on you", and the whole thing then rocked out on a pair of acoustic guitars with the howard leese-esque keyboards and kickin drums behind it too. some songs can't be explained and they have to be experienced. watch the video. no, no roger fisher guitar solos last night, but the soul of it for sure. amazing. and all just steps from my front door, and happening despite weather that crushed business for everybody else in town, but not the back page.

monsoons and most places 0. good beer and good music 1.

death by euphemism

"domestic terrorism" is just a big long way to say "murder", and it's starting to rankle me that we can't call all these people exactly what they are without resorting to sideways linguistic dodges that serves only to obfuscate the truth, and perpetuate the colossal unconstitutional waste of money and time that is the department of homeland insecurity. (a guy craps out on his jet ski, swims a huge long distance to the nearest visible land for safety, climbs a fence and crosses a wide open asphalt area to reach people who can give him aid, and the TSA/DHS morons who couldn't build a system to stop anyone from doing any of that--the fence he climbed was around JFK at the time--want to charge him with terrorism-related crimes??????)

anyway, it seems some nut job has opened fire at the "family research council" because, if i'm not mistaken, it appears that the preferred way to redress things like people being murdered at abortion clinics is to, in turn, murder other people at other places. yeah. real civilized.

can we just call this what it is? a sociopathic homicidal rage/outrage? because that's what it is.

it's murder.

period.

and it's murder when folks get murdered at a sikh temple in wisconsin, and it's murder when folks get murdered delivering legal notices (not to mention ridiculously yellow to journalize this for its proximity to a college, owing to the apparent recent popularity of murdering people at colleges) to a texas apartment, and it's murder when folks get murdered going to the movies in colorado, just like it's murder everywhere else. (except, apparently, when it's in syria, but that's a whole 'nuther can of worms).

i, myself, am against murder. you should be too.

MUSIC!

not everyone is lucky enough to have springsteen tickets today at fenway, but a very creditable alternative tonight is treat her right at passim. (where i'll be). either way, the back page open mic runs well past midnight, so the local nightcap is still, as always, in order.

tomorrow it's melvern taylor and his fabulous meltones on the lawn out back behind the tsongas center from 6 to 8pm, followed by peter lavender and andy kaknes at the athenian corner from 8 until 10, and, as always your favorite nightcap after that.

friday peter lavender is back with his full band (if you haven't seen 'em, this is a great chance--top players at the top of their game) at voices over in centralville, while "the A list" vamps it up over at the zorba room at the olympia--nightcaps included in both packages.

anyone still standing on saturday can just pop me a message and i'll let you know where the party continues, and any and all nightcap suggestions are, of course, always welcome.

MUSIC!

professional management

bernie lynch, caught between the bloody rock in the street, and the hard place between the ears of various city license commissioners, opted for the executive power play cudgel, and declined patience to work with his sitting appointees. forgetting for a moment that he's essentially calling BS on his own bad appointments, it's probably worth taking a moment to figure out what is at risk of happening here, now that the populist groundswell of torches and pitchforks against city bar owners is possible to being given free reign, with the reasoned voices of compromise subsumed beneath the din of a mob. say what you will about mssr's weicker and bayliss, but they did represent what may have been the only power in favor of bar owners in the entire recent process. their intransigence and refusal to compromise has likely cost their favored constituents, the bar owners, a massive penalty indeed, but their points, however few and weakly made, would seem to be critical not to be lost, now that they are (at least ray is) removed from the march of progress.

let's all keep a good thought for to the reason and wisdom of the incoming commissioner(s).

as mentioned here before, the full slate of proposed changes advanced by the city council are onerous and unfair to most. they (the council) might reason successfully that the safety of citizens in the street trumps fairness here, and i won't reject the point outright, but i will observe that, so far, strenuous enforcement of existing regulations has NOT been tried, and there would seem a possible interim step to be taken before the full brunt and scope of the new regulations is hung like a millstone around the necks of the fewer and fewer business owners who, as i've said before, stand increasingly alone in defending the economic vitality of our downtown neighborhood.

here's hoping that bernie lynch makes the effort to express his sincere faith and trust in his next appointment(s) to the commission, that all called to serve feel confident and free to exercise their best wisdom and judgment in reviewing the proposed changes first, before deciding they might be rubber-stamped into effect, to the significant detriment of vulnerable, innocent and responsible bar owners who comprise the vast majority of business owners here. it was this thought that first prompted me to applaud bernie's move to remove the impediments to safe and fair progress. i hope it was the one he had in mind as well.

it would be a tragedy if weicker's and bayliss' failed tenures will result in more damage to the bars than would have ever been necessary if they had just enforced their own rules proactively, fairly and consistently.

real terrorism

check this one out and tell me who the real terrorists are:

http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/Securities/News/2012/08_-_August/Court_keeps_BNY_Mellon_ahead_of_Sentinel_clients_in_payment_line/

a federal court has ruled that segregated customer funds (i.e. the money you and i have in our private personal bank and brokerage and other accounts) remain SECOND in line to the interests of any counterparty bank with which the holding bank or brokerage may have traded. or, put another way--if your bank wants to loot your account, the feds will defend the rights of any other bank ahead of your rights to your own personal property (i.e. money in said offending bank).

your federal tax dollars at work.

while you were away...

lest anyone be confused by my previous (successive in blog order) post, or not capable of reading through the dross and dreck of partisan bullshit permeating our press these days to read what's really important, fully 50% of US counties (yes, HALF this once great country of ours) are now officially declared federal disaster areas owing to the catastrophic drought conditions now bedeviling vast swaths of the continent. putting aside for a moment what paul ryan did or didn't have for breakfast, or what that means to the future of organized politics as we know it, has anyone stopped to consider what this is going to mean in terms of bread and butter, dollars and sense economic survival for all of us?

beef mass-producers are outraged that veggie types are excoriating their industry in particular for some perceived imbalance in the H2O necessary to produce a pound of protein vs a concoction of veggie alternatives, (you can't get a pound of beef-quality protein from any single veggie source, which is something you won't see highlighted on the vegan web pages, but lets not digress), all of which ignores the full truth about grass-fed, range-grazed beef as opposed to factory-farmed alternatives, but all of this just produces a further and pointless digression away from the larger point, which is, we're all in deep shit come this time next year, and we have no idea yet what to do about it.

the price of foodstuffs is going to skyrocket. this, in turn, is going to not only hurt families at the supermarket checkout, but it's going to damage restaurant and other food service businesses, whose cost of ingredients is going to take a huge bite out of their bottom line, not to mention their ability to maintain, let alone hire, wait and other staffs. it's further going to upset the US balance of payments, where our food exports will evaporate and imports will burgeon. the federal monies to reimburse those wiped out by the drought will land, in turn, on all the rest of us who are picking up the ever-increasing tab on our have-to-eats. economic sectors based on farm equipment manufacturing and related construction and other ongoing development will implode. this will further serve to reduce tax receipts even while government spending skyrockets, and our collective ability to pay for it shrinks.

so right now, beef producers are slaughtering their herds and selling the meat for whatever they can get, because they can't afford to feed and water them. veggie types are saying we should boycott that entire marketplace, but, seriously, the smartest thing we can do right now is eat the results of that hay while the sun is incessantly shining (amidst the tornadoes and other extreme weather in between) because we're not going to be able to afford burgers at next summer's cookouts. i'm already all-in to help out the lobster fishermen for their particular glut, but ask anyone--i do have room left over for a burger or two as well.

in a proper marketplace, ie one not distorted beyond all legitimate function by those who would think that they know better, (you know, the ones driving priuses/prii instead of biking), we'd all shift to eat whatever we can afford, and the producers would shift to load our tables with it. here's hoping.

in the meantime, expect a vicious bust to the present boom cycle we're enjoying at our supermarket checkout counters, and to pay through the nose for groceries over the coming months. (then look out for the tax bills to come).

i'm betting you won't hear obomney or robama talking turkey about any of it, but take a look at what little info you can glean from the politics-obsessed news media ignoring the whole thing. the picture is not pretty.

lefty loonies

i just got back from a week in the woods with a bunch of lefty lunatics, and i gotta tell you if there's anything romney might consider to do to make himself electable against all overwhelming and obvious odds and evidence to the contrary, it would be to send everybody off for a week with this particular sort of rabid obama-ite. yup, if the mittster could only figure out a way to do that, then november would immediately become a republican slam dunk. and don't get me wrong--these are the best-meaning people you could ever meet, and they always *try* to do right, but sometimes the actual doing hangs them up so thoroughly that the results become absolutely comedic, even if just that little bit tragic.

the most prolific fodder for lefty lunatic comedy this past week was the daily at-dawn drumming circle on the beach. forgetting for a moment the beachfront houses all full of people not sharing their devotion to loud expositions at 6am, these are the type of people who would then repeatedly and insistently complain that the camp had not made prior arrangements to pre-supply them with chairs so they didn't have to carry their own down to their daily sandy circle. yup, love mother earth, but make sure you get to pound it out to the inconvenience of everyone else around while you're doing it. they honestly were upset that others didn't share their enthusiasm for it all, but, then again, i guess that noise pollution isn't pollution as far as they are concerned.

and neither, apparently, is the kind that spews from the tailpipes of a fleet of toyota priuses (prii?) either.

i should digress to share that the program for the older youth at the camp was split this year into three separate tracks--art, theater and "outdoor". many of the oldsters had opined that, though art and theater could indeed provide worthwhile spiritual endeavor, there was great question as to whether the youth could possibly become enriched by things like beach volleyball (not at 6am--maybe that was the problem) and biking.

well, i made several mistakes this week, and perhaps greater than only the mention that i had once had an nra sticker on one of my ukuleles (removed for a joke by a mischievous friend, and not yet replaced, and yet you have not seen the speed of light until you've seen the rapidity that a human jaw can drop at the mention of such to a dyed in the original wool liberal even without the actual sticker itself to offend) was the expressed opinion that that anyone opting to drive a prius rather than ride a bicycle could kiss those kids' collective ass. (not for nothing, but i'd be interested to do a sociological study of obesity and veganism because i'm pretty damn sure there's a fairly high correlation). well, maybe i wasn't so colorful in my choice of language, but the message was pretty much the same thing. and you would have thought that i had just pissed on the pope. (well, maybe not the pope--these were unitarians and they're not much for popery, but, again, there i go to digress).

there were no fewer than eight toyota priuses (prii?) parked in the parking lot for the conference/camping week. and exactly five people (in addition to the kids) who brought and rode bicycles for any portion of their time there. the main group who went to the wildlife park up in gray? minivans and priuses. (prii?). the main group that went down to the tidal pools in biddeford? minivans and priuses. (prii?). the even more who went into town for beer and near-endless bottles of their favorite vino for consumption at the daily happy hour i mean social hour? minivans and priuses. (prii?). me and a four others and a handful of high schoolers who took sojourns to all of those places, plus the tidal river between saco and scarborough and the eastern trail up towards portland? bicycles. and somehow WE were the bad people (well, at least me for having the temerity to say it out loud) for not crediting the prius preeners with greener-than-thou cred over all others.

loonies.

want to be green? 1) eat a balanced diet that does not include fistfulls of chemically-prepared supplements to offset the absence of protein and minerals on a vegan-only menu. 2) ride a bicycle that does not feature hundreds of pounds of heavy metals (not many things on this planet as toxic as hybrid automobile batteries) that only marginally enable a slight reduction in fossil fuel consumed. 3) get off the case of a kid who wants to spend their summer outdoors instead of inside smearing paint (toxic at that) and/or play-acting instead.

loonies.

please help sanity to prevail

this one has a lot of loose ends and no clear place to start, so prizes for those who can make it through to the end. (no fair skipping down--you have to read all of it to qualify).

i'll choose for lack of a better opening option the recent request by the city manager for the resignations of two of the three license commissioners. clearly, you know i'm in favor of such--it's my opinion that the license commission's lack of participation, let alone leadership which is its charter, in the process of responding to "downtown disorder" (supt. lavallee's preferred euphemism which is as good as any) has been the largest impediment to achieving a safe and prosperous downtown for all residents, employees, patrons and proprietors of the various businesses here. i'm guessing the city council and city manager are most exercised about the commission's repudiation-via-inaction of the recent manifesto of proposed licensing changes, so forgive me if i'm mistaken, but i'm about to continue off on my tangent.

the proposed licensing changes are flawed.

they do not successfully distinguish between responsible businesses (kappy's, for one example raised at the most recent licensing hearing, has been in business almost half a century without one single license-related incident) and those causing all the problems, and they do not fairly respect the legitimate and fair economic interests of the few business owners who stand increasingly alone in defending the economic vitality of our downtown neighborhood. (consider that the city school department fled the bon marche building a couple years ago). a responsible license commission COULD HAVE respected all sides in this collaborative effort by adding their expertise to the mix, and proposing and adopting a reasonable subset of the proposed changes that would have accomplished many things, including respecting the righteous outrage of citizens over the repeated near-fatal assaults occurring downtown. they could have codified requirements for TIPS certification for all servers in the city for one egregiously obvious oversight not currently in our existing rules. they could have done something--ANYTHING at all--but they chose to not. kudos to the city manager for calling "enough is enough" on the charade.

but here's the bigger point--adoption of the full set of proposed changes is wrong. (at least in my relevant opinion). i live here. i eat out here. i listen to music here and attend theater shows here and go to art galleries and related openings here, and i certainly do enjoy beer here. (we will leave the brand discussion out of this one--this is getting long enough as it is). i have grown to greatly respect the business owners here, including absolutely the vast majority of bar owners. my hat is constantly off to the police here who keep good order with the resources they have, from the superintendant right down to each and every beat cop and switchboard operator. and i certainly respect and empathize with all my friends and neighbors here who complete the rich fabric of downtown life, and have to literally live with the consequences of all our actions.

so, first of all, to close chapter one of this novel, PLEASE, let's have a responsible and engaged license commission that is strong enough to say "no" to excess regulation, as has at least the existing and failing one, while it is also proactive in carrying out responsible enforcement of reasonable regulations that achieve the goal of a safe and prosperous city. i said it at the last big meeting, and i'll say it again. all the rules in the world cannot help a lack of vigorous and fair enforcement, which is where we are now. let's keep in mind that new rules are not going to get us the biggest bang for our bucks and efforts. better enforcement of existing rules will get us that. and, while we're at it, yeah, maybe we can add a FEW sensible new ones that both respect the establishments AND their customers AND the neighborhood in which they coexist.

ok.

chapter 2.

a couple years ago i was in the process of organizing an extremely self-involved benefit for the merrimack valley food back, the world peas cooperative agriculture effort, and, coincidentally, my own 50th birthday. (it was and is my belief that if you can't celebrate your own life by helping others in theirs you're missing out, and i'd say i forever proved my point to myself with this one, but everyone's mileage always varies). anyway, i was having a certain amount of difficulty in conceiving of a venue in which to have this big shindig, owing to the need to save as much of the proceeds as possible for the food bank and the farming coop, and in a somewhat completely random conversation with kevin hayhurst, one of the partners owning and running brian's ivy hall, it was settled on the spot that the benefit show could have his place for nothing. most places were talking hundreds if not thousands of dollars for a room and staff. the brian's room was perfectly sized. kevin and his crew put up with loading in and loading out of four different full bands, dozens of various artists and artisans, an eventual $2000 pile of donated foodstuffs, and who can say how much inconvenience to go along with all of it. and they did it with grace and style. and all for nothing. yeah, he made a few bucks back on the bar, and he and his partners and bartenders and barbacks and door people earned all of it several times over with their effort and hospitality.

i am forever grateful, as i know are the merrimack valley food bank and world peas coop.

so it is this morning (chaper 3) that i am reading about emily desmond's dream to attend berklee college of music in the fall. (she and her talents have already been accepted to their songwriting program, but as any parent of teenagers knows, getting accepted is the easy part in making a college education possible). in the words of her uncle, paul dubuque, emily is a 4.0 student and national honor society scholar who has given of herself countless hours and years of effort to help care for her severely autistic brother, and raise money for autism research. she's spent her life giving to others, and now faces a daunting challenge in doing, finally, something meaningful for herself. she has to find a way to raise the money to see her dreams come to reality.

it does not surprise me that her uncle would want to help. it does not surprise me that other local musicians have all instantly and immediately volunteered to play at a fundraising event. and it does not surprise me that, once again, the partners at brian's ivy hall have made their room available so that all this might become possible.

so, here we are, at the moment when the few of you who were able to make it this far have earned your prize. and here it is:

on sunday, august 26th, a lineup of local musicians who will knock and rock your socks off are waiting to play JUST FOR YOU. it's at brian's ivy hall, and the details are growing by the hour.

please help sanity prevail, and help reward everyone who does so much for others with a little giving of yourself. i promise you it will make you feel like a million.

more beer

the comment thread on my last beer post got me thinking... what is the beer-side recipe for a successful bar here in lowell?

one commenter raised the corpses of caffe paradiso and fortunato's to excoriate the evils of "$8 beers". (actually he went as high as 10 in his remarks, but i'll dismiss those last 2 bucks as playful hyperbole). which got me thinking: bars who have failed in my general neighborhood include not only caffe paradiso and fortunato's, two of the pricier, more ridiculous stabs at pretension around, but also furey's and at least one incarnation of the white eagle, who were, i think it's safe to say, a little bit lower on the price scale in their offerings.

so what have we learned?

dharma buns purveyed teen comfort food (burgers, fries and shakes) at a bit of a premium with a fridge full of more-expensive craft bottled beer and without well-promoted delivery services. their ambiance was a trifle discomfitting. their seating less than welcoming for informal groups. fail. wings over lowell took the same space with a menu full of teen comfort food (this time wings) at a bit of the same premium, and by all indications are doing just fine. they ditched the beer, but put in booth seating an a no-nonsense ordering and take-out process, and are feeding lines of kids every hour of every day they're open. (pending) win.

caffe paradiso leveraged "cafe culture" for all it was worth, with $8 beers, $12 cocktails, and some of the worst service you could devise. they had a devoted following, but not nearly enough of one to remain in business. (perhaps this is the exact point the commenter was on about). fail. fuse bistro moved in the same space, offered the same outdoor cafe seating, and improved the layout and comfort inside at the same time as coming up with a menu featuring $9 burgers and $5 beers. the 5-year test suggested by the commenter has not been completed, but i'd put a fiver on this outfit doing just fine on this corner with how they're doing it. yup, they can mix you a $12 drink and serve you a $22 sirloin steak, too. and, i think, this may be part of the secret of their success on the flip side of letting burger-and-a-good-beer patrons get their preference on for well less than $20, tip included. portfolio theory is not wrong--something for everyone. AND, i'm happy to point out, no "bud light" among the taps to confuse their customers. (pending) win.

furey's put the "dive" in "dive bar". i wrote here some time ago of having a problem understanding a $9 tab for three beers and a burger--i swear, as god is my witness, that i could not understand how a joint could stay in business at prices like that. i guess i was not wrong. the commenter would, i'm guessing, want to link this to the concept of a "blue collar town" (whatever does that mean if there are no blue collar jobs left here for people to have?) and suggest it's the way to go. oops--fail. hong cuc still slings $3 banh mi sandwiches on the back side of that same building. no beer at all--just absolutely great food at fair prices. grab your own six-pack down the block of the flavor your prefer, and have some friends over for a cheap feast. absolute win.

the courtyard was a hard-smoker-and-drinker's institution. can't get much better "blue collar if only there was blue collar anymore" than that. i can't count the number of times folks i was with said, well after midnight, "let's go to the courtyard", and there they went to chain smoke cigarettes and drink on the cheap. no idea what happened, but, as we all know, fail. instead, some wanna-be-visionaries have instituted in its place an emporium of absolutely maniacally awesome burgers, great pizza, and, no word of a lie, the biggest array of grilled cheese sandwiches i have ever seen on a menu at one time. and $4 half glasses of the most awesome lineup of beers in the city. 5 year rule, yes, i understand. but has anyone gone by the place to look at the numbers? we're talking the same hard-smoker-and-drinker (cheap) kids just like before, only now dropping their cash on GOOD food and GOOD beer. i'll even allow that the jury's out on this one. but, like i said before, i'd still be willing to put a fiver on the five year life-span. (pending ?).

so what do we learn? overpriced joints suck, and they fail. everybody, and i mean everybody, cheers. but, ironically, even the cheapest of the cheap joints fail. furey's even had awesome burgers. but their beer sucked. absolutely sucked. i'm not saying it would have been enough to save 'em, but i would have liked to see 'em try. the courtyard was cheap. it failed. what, then, does "blue collar" even mean around here???

the point of a business is to find what customers want. wings over lowell counts on ease-of-ordering and comfortable booth seating to put their little $6 trays of wings over. ward 8 slings pricey grilled cheese with pricey (awesome) beer to wash it down and gets plenty of takers, too.

i'm just sayin', if you're running a place with the interest on making people happy, you ought to at least offer some decent beer. it can't hurt.

watching the watchers

ok, it's been some weeks now, and i, like a lot of people, continue to wait to hear from the LPD what their "gotta have it" eye-in-the-sky at the intersection at palmer and middle has determined about the recent incidents happening immediately under its little-bit-bigger-brother gaze. (for example, the smashed-face kid handcuffed in the middle of palmer street with his blood splashed all over street, sidewalk, parked cars and buildings, etc., but most importantly the life-threateningly injured ones back at the enterprise parking lot). it's been implied, perhaps not intentionaly by some, but implied nonetheless by others including me, that downtown liquor establishments need to be more clearly identified by their complicity AND their compliance, and the guilty parties earned of their consequences so that the innocent ones can pursue their legitimate, rightful, and very important business here in holding the line on empty storefronts and the utter disintegration of downtown lowell. (anyone want to take bets on how many froyo joints are papered over by this time this winter?) we've been told these cameras can make us safer and aid in those efforts. well, i, for one, feel absolutely LESS safe if their illusion of safety cannot be backed up with effective use in identifying AND exhonorating or convicting appropriately based on resulting evidence. it's why we've given up a fair measure of our privacy, after all, and tread that much closer to the abridgement of our constitutional rights in hopes that fewer people wind up in the hospital, and more of those putting them there wind up in front of a judge.

anyway, follow-up on the police incident report shows officers involved in the eventual response reported NO disturbance ("no trouble or problems at all) inside any establishment, and not at all the identity of the agressor and attacker in the incident itself. (they were rightfully attending to the wounded). so, my next suggestion is, ROLL THE TAPE! (didja catch roll the tanks on market street this past saturday night? good stuff!)

the recording of the street scene should be able to get us closer to from whence the attacker egressed, if only to confirm he didn't egress from any door on middle street, and even, perhaps, who started the whole thing and why. but, curiously, there's been no follow-up of which i'm aware, or progress in establishing either culpability or innocence--the essential question at hand.

if a bar is doing right, it needs to be credited with such, and aided in abating violence at its door. if it's doing wrong, well, i should hope responsible ownership would be eager to take responsibility for any such, and amend their business appropriately so that it can successfully continue. but what we have here is a big "no comment" from the police over these incidents, and this, to me, is troubling.

not because of the downtown disorder, but because of my civil rights to privacy in my own neighborhood. yes, i'm willing to compromise on public cameras, but IF AND ONLY IF those public cameras are being used successfully for the public good.

if not, they gotta go.