Tag Massachusetts
Invasion Of The Burger Snatchers
They’re building a Sonic Drive-In on Main Street in my town. It’s just the latest in a number of retail constructions on the main drag in the past couple of years; you’d have no idea the entire economy was in the crapper by the number of construction sites. Sadly for the property developers, though, once they get the sites built, they don’t always have tenants ready to move in, and so there’s a lot of brand-new-but-half-empty retail space waiting for the time way, waaay off in the future, when somebody might want to move in. But I digress a little…
The Sonic is being built right next door to the McDonald’s, which cannot have the McDonald’s franchisee too happy. Previously, the space housed a car dealer. When the car showroom building was torn down a couple of weeks ago, everybody was abuzz wondering what would take the space, but now that the frame of the building is up, so is the large banner on the front of the site. No doubt the cognoscenti of our little suburb knew exactly what was going on well in advance, but for us hoi polloi it came down to a six-foot strip of vinyl tied to a temporary fence to bring the news.
It’s kind of a big deal, not just because our town lags behind all of its neighbors in sheer density of fast food chains that aren’t Dunkin’ Donuts, but because it’s only the second Sonic location in the entire state of Massachusetts. Indeed, it is only the second Sonic in ALL SIX New England states. The first Sonic opened last summer to much attention from cherry-limeade-starved souls, who were willing to endure two-hour lines, valet parking, and unholy traffic congestion on a major thruway (the infamous Route One strip). Needless to say, there is much tut-tutting and clucking by the villagers, who are worried that the already-busy section of Main Street will turn into a parking lot from all the looky-loos who will descend on us like a plague of french-fry-devouring locusts.
Having grown up in Maine in the 1970s, I have been down this road before. When we first moved to Lewiston-Auburn in the summer of 1971, there was only one McDonald’s for a “metro” area of about 70,000, and it was way on the outskirts of Lewiston, close to the Maine Turnpike exit. It was a huge deal when, several years later, a second McDonald’s was built on the Auburn side of the river, and then equally big deals ensued when Burger King arrived a few years after that, and finally, when I was in high school, Wendy’s. Maine, however, is always late to the party for the expansion of national retail chains; there are still only a small handful of Starbucks in the whole state (our town in Massachusetts got its Starbucks two years ago, but they are numerous in the Boston area).
In a bit of serendipity, this infographic is making the rounds online. It shows the distribution of the major fast-food burger chains in the United States. Here’s the Fast Company article that brought the map to the attention of the Internet, and here’s the original blog post from a site called WeatherSealed.com. The Fast Company version changed the background color to make the McDonald’s locations (which were plotted in black against a black background in the original) stand out better. It’s interesting to see that McDonald’s base is so tightly concentrated in the Northeast, but even more interesting to see the predominance of other chains in other regions: Dairy Queen, which is a rarity here in the Northeast and operates almost exclusively in its form as an ice cream stand, OWNS the South Central region in a way that McDonald’s can only dream of.
For the sake of the franchisee, I hope the arrival of Sonic goes better than the arrival of Krispy Kreme donuts a few years ago. The anticipation behind the opening of the Krispy Kreme in Medford was nothing short of insane, and the initial customer response was enormous, but after about a year the whole thing died right off and the Kripsy Kreme chain itself went into bankruptcy. The retail location sat empty for a long time before finally being picked up by the beloved local chain of roast beef sandwich shops, Kelly’s. Meanwhile, the Ghost Town Plaza across the street sure could use half a dozen tenants.
I’d Loan Him My Barf Bag, But I’m Gonna Need It Myself
There will be far too much written and said about yesterday’s election in Massachusetts, 99% of which will not be worth the time or trouble to pay any attention to. So I don’t think I’m going to add my own bloviating, but I will share this clip from Monday’s “The Daily Show” wherein Jon Stewart manages to say the 1% that IS worth paying attention to:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Mass Backwards | ||||
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I’ll also share a quote I saw elsewhere today. An unnamed Massachusetts Democratic Party figure is quoted as saying:
Better Scott Brown for two years than Martha Coakley for a lifetime
That’s probably more indicative of the reality here in Massachusetts than anything anyone in the media (except Jon, of course) has to offer.
Either Way We’re Screwed
Mercifully, there are less than 24 hours to go before the special election between Martha Coakley and Scott Brown. Between the robocalls and the TV commercials, it’s reached the point that I am totally turned off to both candidates and really don’t want either of them to win. And, quite frankly, neither of them deserve to win: Coakley has proven that she does not have what it takes to be a national-level politician by blowing what should have been a no-brainer election, and Brown is an empty suit who got lucky to be able to cash in on the anti-Obama vibe at exactly the right moment. Neither of them could carry Ted Kennedy’s bags let alone succeed him in the Senate.
Back in December, as we wound up the primaries, I said that I thought Coakley would turn out to be a weak candidate, easily targeted by the Republicans, except I was looking down the road at the seat’s general election. Who would have believed she wouldn’t even be able to seal the deal on this? She ran a stealth campaign in the primary, but was lucky that her opposition was so divided among three candidates. Not so lucky when it was whittled down to one guy who had nothing to lose by blowing all his cash early on TV spots. Whether it’s a case of her campaign thinking they didn’t have to do any work, or a case of the candidate herself not really being up to the challenge, they’ve blown this fair and square.
A win by Brown tomorrow won’t really change much here in Massachusetts. Don’t expect to see a surge of Republican candidates sweeping the well-entrenched Democrats of the House delegation or the state legislature. The Democratic governor is toast anyway, and Massachusetts does have a tendency to elect Republican governors despite the Democratic legislature. Brown himself is not terribly substantial; I wouldn’t expect him to hold up well against a better Democratic candidate when the seat comes up, even if the GOP gave him all the money in the world, and you can be damn well sure that the Democrats won’t let someone like Martha Coakley on the ticket again.
If Coakley does manage to pull a rabbit out of a hat tomorrow and win, she goes into the Senate already wounded at home. No doubt she stands ready to be a good soldier for Harry Reid, but with such a stunning lack of support among the most liberal constituency in the country, she won’t hold the line on anything tough. And she won’t survive into a full term if she doesn’t radically alter her style as a candidate. If she has come this close to defeat at the hands of a total nobody, imagine the drubbing she would get if the Republicans came up with a serious contender.
I’ll hold my nose and vote for Coakley tomorrow, but frankly I am disappointed by the entire turn of events of this process. Obviously, a lot of other Massachusetts voters are, too, which is why nobody should be surprised to learn on Wednesday morning that Scott Brown is the new junior senator.
Goin’ Demmycrat
Ted Kennedy was not even cold in his grave before the early motions by a number of Democratic politicians had begun to replace him, but now we are finally on the eve of the special primary election to choose the official Democratic and Republican candidates, which, this being Massachusetts, is pretty much tantamount to actually filling the vacant seat, since the Republican guy is nothing but token opposition. Whomever wins the Democratic primary is 99.99% likely to be the next junior senator, unless he or she turns out to be a hoax candidate looking for a Bravo reality show or yet another of Tiger Woods’ many paramours. And even then he/she has a pretty good shot.
The four Democrats are not entirely the ones that might have been anticipated during the last year of Ted’s life, as the end became more and more plainly imminent. At least one missing candidate chose to sit it out because of the last-minute waffling of the most likely candidate — Joe Kennedy — who ultimately decided to sit out too. So the two traditional politicians who did declare went from being likely also-rans to serious contenders. That left wiggle room for the other two candidates, who would have been laughed right out of the race otherwise, to make some noise. The noisiest has certainly been Steve Pagliuca, one of the owners of the Boston Celtics, who, if nothing else, managed to raise his name-recognition with his constant barrage of ads. He is, however, completely unqualified to hold one of the most important seats in the United States Senate; I realize that there is a long tradition of buying one’s way into the Millionaire’s Club of Washington D.C., but this really isn’t the time to be giving some complete novice a turn to play senator. The other non-politician, Alan Khazei, is another rich guy, but with the pedigree of being a civic do-gooder. He’d probably make a very good governor, and I hope he takes this opportunity to turn his campaign into a starter for a gubnatorial campaign next fall — our current governor is a complete waste of time and doesn’t deserve a second term, and rather than give it up to some wackjob Republican, Khazei would be a good replacement.
Of the two traditional politicians, it’s great to be able to say that either would be okay as a senator if they win. However, I think that it’s very important this time around to take the long view and think about whomever is chosen as potentially being someone who will become nationally significant and politically prominent for a very long time to come. It’s my concern, frankly, that the front runner, state Attorney General Martha Coakley, is not likely to become that person. Her political ambitions have pushed her very quickly into a state-wide office without much time to develop beyond her roots as a prosecuting attorney. So again, it’s just a little too much on-the-job training required, and I also suspect that she would be vulnerable to targeting from the Republican Party when the natural election for the seat rolls around.
The other traditional politician is Representative Mike Capuano, who did, in fact, replace Joe Kennedy when he quit his Congressional seat. Capuano has been a member of Congress for a dozen years, sitting on unglamorous-but-important committees like Transportation & Infrastructure and Financial Services. Before going to Congress, he was the mayor of the inner-ring suburb of Somerville. To my thinking, that’s exactly the sort of resume one hopes to see from a Senatorial candidate, not dilettantism or ladder-climbing over-ambition. If elected, it is easy to imagine Capuano as being able to step immediately into the political realm of the Senate without a learning curve and grow into a leadership role despite being the junior senator, much as John Kerry was able to emerge in his own right despite the overpowering importance of Ted Kennedy.
For most of my adult life, I have been registered as an independent voter, eschewing the opportunity to vote in party primary elections, but I’ve decided that this particular primary is worth voting in to try to have whatever sway a single voter can have in an election that is likely to have as much significance locally as voting in a presidential election does nationally. The passing of Ted Kennedy marked a genuine turning point in American politics and likely in American history as well, and the choice of his replacement is too important to waive for the sake of maintaining non-affiliation with a party I mostly vote for anyway. Tomorrow I will cast my vote for Mike Capuano for Senate.
To my readers who are not fellow Massholes and neither know nor care about our local electoral politics, I apologize for monopolizing your attention, but believe me when I tell you this choice will ultimately matter to you, too.
More Live Massholes To Love
As I was digging up some assorted factoids for a rant about the H1N1 hysteria, I came across a bit of information that actually caught me by surprise: Massachusetts has the lowest motor vehicle accident fatality rate in the United States and has held that distinction since at least 2004. If you scroll down the page on that second link, you’ll see that this is true even in DUI-related accidents.
Quite honestly, that’s not what I’d expect given the way people drive around here. The Reuters article in that first link says that the highest fatality rates are in the South, then offers the speculation that the rates are higher because people have to drive longer distances to get from place to place. My own theory is that we spend so much time snarled in traffic that it prevents all those aggro drivers from causing more deadly accidents than if they could get about unimpeded. If we had miles of open road, they’d be littered with corpses, and not from all those people dying of the Swine Flu…which, as I originally intended to post about, they aren’t.
Hunger In America, More Hunger In New England
While most of the mainstream media have been busily slobbering over Sarah Palin all week, a lot of the blogs and news websites I read have been talking about something that actually matters: a report from the Department of Agriculture that indicated fully 25% of all the children in the United States live in households that experience what the USDA euphemistically calls “food insecurity”. (Link to PDF of the report itself here). “Food insecurity” means that those families basically do not know where the next meal will come from and frequently have to choose between buying food and paying for other necessities, or even choosing which members of the family will get to eat on a given day.
The steep rise in unemployment is the most obvious factor, but the report points out that food insecurity is a problem even for families where parents hold down full-time jobs, indicating that wages are not able to keep up with the increasing cost of food. The Tom Toles cartoon at the top highlights a genuine irony of the situation — obesity from over-consumption of junk calories because the cost of better nutrition is beyond the reach of people struggling economically.
This article from the Daily Beast looks at the data in terms of what the author calls “Disproportionate Hunger” — where the costs of food, housing and energy are disproportionately high and thus exacerbate the situation. Three of the six New England states fall into the “Top 10″ list: Maine, Vermont, and Connecticut (which comes in at an astonishingly high #4). Massachusetts, by contrast, is #49, and New Hampshire #48. New England is traditionally an expensive place to live due to high energy costs for our long winters and the cost of transportation of goods into this region, and it also suffers from a perennially weak economy outside of the Boston economic zone. When times get bad in this country, New England always feels it harder than most.
This post at Fast Company tries to make the case that maybe we should be looking for technological solutions — incorporating engineered food products like the infamous “golden rice” to improve nutrition in junk food — but that’s really terribly misdirected, if you ask me. The availability of adequate nutrition is not the issue in this country. Indeed, even the global crisis in child hunger is less about the availability of adequate nutrition than it is about the iniquities of the economic situation, although it translates into genuine starvation elsewhere in the world. The issue boils down to the inequalities of the economic situation, whether we are talking about Vermont or Ethiopia.
But, hey, as long as all those Wall Street guys got their multimillion-dollar bonuses for bankrupting the rest of the planet, who cares if some kids in Skowhegan or Bridgeport or Rutland go without breakfast a few times a week, right? It’s their own damn fault for being poor in the first place!
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
