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.
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!
After this past weekend, even *I* am suffering from Kennedy Fatigue, but I wanted to make a few last observations about the last seven days and the next few months to come.
First, I was a bit unimpressed with the way the media turned Teddy’s ex-wife Joan into a non-person. We heard over and over again about how his second wife, Vicki, was the true love of his life, how she deserved so much credit for his personal turn-around, and how brave and strong she was being through all the public wailing and rending of garments. I have no qualms with that at all, because I agree with pretty much every single point. But Joan Bennett Kennedy was the woman who had to put up with him through the drinking and the carousing, the tragic years of his brothers’ deaths, the brutal shame of Chappaquiddick, and even made the effort to put on a smiling face for the doomed 1980 primary campaign. And though it seems to me that Ted and Joan only managed to bring out the worst in one another, she deserved a little more kindness last week.
Though the media seemed not to notice, she was, in fact, at the memorial service and the funeral. In the picture above, she is being greeted by Joe Biden after the funeral mass — all of the Senate colleagues who served with Teddy for any length of time would have known Joan socially from the earlier years. This ABC online news story is the only one I found that had much to say about her in the context of the public mourning or about her personal life now. A few years ago, she was in pretty desperate straits, having gone back to drinking and having been involved in a few embarrassing incidents that compelled her children to try to exert legal guardianship over her, but she’s in better shape now. I hope that Teddy’s passing lets her find a bit of additional peace in her own life.
Here’s Jack Nicholson studiously not talking to anybody at the funeral. I would just like to invite you to imagine the wild and crazy times that Teddy and Jack must have had together back in the day and then consider why nobody is speaking to him. I’ll bet Vicki didn’t give Jack a hug.
Rank sentimentalist that I am, I have always loved the song “The Impossible Dream” from the musical “Man of La Mancha”, even though it has been permanently branded as the World’s Biggest Cheeseball by the entire entertainment world. Still, it had not occurred to me to associate the song with Ted Kennedy until Brian Stokes-Mitchell sang it at the JFK Library memorial service. Here’s the inevitable YouTube clip of that performance:
John Kennedy and his White House years are forever associated with the musical “Camelot”, thanks to some very clever PR efforts from Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Over time, I think the Kennedys probably don’t want Teddy’s legacy too closely linked to the story of Don Quixote, the crackpot knight who tilted at windmills, but the lyrics of “Impossible Dream” really turn quite poignant and hopeful when sung in the context of Ted Kennedy’s terrible and magnificent struggles:
“To dream the impossible dream,
To fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear the unbearable sorrow,
To run where the brave dare not go.
To right the unrightable wrong,
To love pure and chaste from afar,
To strive, when your arms are too weary,
To reach the unreachable star.
This is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how far.
To fight, without question or pause,
to be willing to march into hell
for a heavenly cause.
And I know, if I’ll only be true
to this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I’m laid to my rest.
And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars,
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star.”
I don’t think I’ll ever hear that song again without thinking of Ted Kennedy.
For the next few weeks, we, the citizenry of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, will have to endure the struggle between all the Teddy-wannabes as they sort themselves out for the special election in January to fill his seat. There’s a minor secondary struggle over appointing a temporary fill-in until the election, but nobody who has any real designs on becoming the next junior senator will have anything to do with that appointment, since they will be expected to sit out the January vote. Since it seems likely the legislature will overturn their own shortsighted 2004 law and let the governor appoint someone, it will undoubtedly be some long-time hard-boiled Democratic pol who has nothing to lose by being a benchwarmer for three months OR it really will turn out to be Vicki Kennedy, who has no interest in running but might be obliged in the very short term. The January election, though, will be entirely dependent on the political whims of Joe Kennedy, Ted’s nephew and a former congressman himself. There are several up-and-coming Dems who could use this opportunity as a big stepping stone, but if Joe runs all bets are off. It will be interesting, but also infuriating, to follow the local political news for the next few months.
Usually I find stuff like this at Strange Maps or The Roadside Scholar, but this actually came from Neatorama. It’s a print of a map of the United States by artist Emily Wick, which includes the official (and/or unofficial) mottoes of all 50 states. You can buy the map of the whole country, or, if you prefer, you can buy t-shirts with each individual state as it appears on the larger map.
It’s interesting to discover that there is apparently at least one winery in every state of the Union. Many of them do not have their own vineyards, they buy the grapes and then make their own blends of juices to produce whatever varieties of wine they hope to sell. Quite a few make wine from fruits other than grapes, and in those cases they do indeed often grow their own fruit. Most of the wineries only sell their products locally. Stein doesn’t say how they managed to choose the wines they sampled, or why one winery might have been chosen over another, so the rankings that he ends up with need to be viewed as only being representative of the particular wines involved and NOT the quality of winemaking in each state.
I tell you this because one of the wines they deemed “undrinkable” came from Massachusetts (see the image above). The wine, a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc called “Nobksa Red” comes from the Cape Cod Winery in Falmouth. But there are half a dozen or so wineries in Massachusetts, at least one of which I know produces some excellent wines.
Here’s an interactive gallery of all the wines they tried. You can click on each bottle for a closeup image and a short review of that particular wine, and you can also display them grouped by their ratings (excellent, good, bad, and undrinkable). One of their favorites was a Muscat from Jewell Towne Vineyards in New Hampshire, only about a half an hour’s ride from our house. They also make a port and a couple of different varieties of eiswein (ice wine). I think I’ll have to go check them out sometime.
If you are a Comcast broadband customer here in Eastern Massachusetts or in other parts of the eastern half of New England, you might want to unplug your cable modem for a minute or two and then reboot it (along with your computer)…just as soon as you’re done reading this blog, of course.
DSL Reports says that internal sources at Comcast confirm that they’ve completed the DOCSIS 3.0 upgrade for all customers in this area, and that faster broadband speeds are available IMMEDIATELY to all customers, regardless of their service package. Comcast is raising rates next week, and will be rolling out several new tiers of boradband service as well, but everyone in this service area will see an increase of throughput, since even the basic tier will be faster than the standard 2Mbps service that has been around for the last couple of years. Posters in the DSL Reports forums say that their throughput speeds have doubled since yesterday.
The rest of you will have to wait a little longer. Comcast says they won’t have DOCSIS 3.0 fully implemented nationally until 2010.
Via Serious Eats, here’s a post from Road Food Digest about the best ice cream in New England. Three of their regular contributors trekked to 50 places that sell their own ice cream all over the six New England states and rated each and every one using vanilla ice cream with hot fudge sauce as their standard for judging.
Four of the fifty rated stands received perfect five-star scores: Tubby’s in Wayne, ME; Herrell’s in Allston, MA; Sundae School in Dennisport, MA; and Shaw’s Ridge Farm in Sanford, ME. The two Massachusetts locations are actually multiple-store local chains (Herrell’s, for example, is also in Cambridge and Northampton, MA), so it’s probably safe to say any of the locations you might visit would have the same quality products. The two Maine stores are single locations.
I have to say that I have never been to any of these four places, not even Herrell’s. They seem to be the most enthusiastic about Tubby’s, which is in one of the little towns around Augusta. It has only been open for a few years, so it lacks the sort of legendary reputation that some of the other places on the full list merit, but if the ice cream is as good as they say, I would be willing to make the trip on some future visit to Maine. We try to make at least one stop every year at Hodgman’s Frozen Custard in New Gloucester, which is a lot closer to my old stomping grounds than Wayne, and they would probably have made this list as well except for the critical distinction between frozen custard and ice cream (namely, the use of eggs in the custard base).
(My friend Jo spends time at a summer cottage in that neck of the woods in Maine, so I’m hoping she might be able to chime in with a first-hand account of Tubby’s…or maybe she can plan a visit there to tell us about it.)
Obviously, I need to check out Herrell’s, which is smack in the middle of Harvard Square, and for which I have no excuse for never having visited. All I can say in my defense is that we’re usually not looking for ice cream when we’re in Harvard Square, so I’ve just never bothered.
Sanford, Maine is also a little out of our usual beaten path, but I’m sure we can get there as well. I’ve only ever been to Cape Cod once and didn’t particularly enjoy the experience, so it’s fairly unlikely we’ll go out of our way to go to Dennisport for ice cream. I’ll just take their word for it.
There are quite a few places that got three or four stars that we are well-acquainted with: Brown’s in York Beach, ME, Bedford Farms in Bedford, MA, Kimball Farms in Westford, MA, Lizzy’s in Waltham, MA, and so on. Those are some truly outstanding ice cream stands, too, so these top four must really border on the incredible to garner five stars.
The one thing I will say about all of these places is that they give you just too darn much ice cream. True, you do pay a premium price and there is something to be said about getting your money’s worth, but I have found that if I order anything bigger than a kiddie cone at a place like Bedford Farms or Richardson’s, it’s more than I can eat. And believe me, I am a serious ice cream person. But nobody needs to eat an entire pint of ice cream in one sitting, which is about what you get on a “regular” cone.
Meanwhile, out in Lexington, where Paul Revere was caught by a British patrol on the night of his famous ride, workers doing renovations on the historic Hancock-Clarke House discovered some 18th-Century shoes inside a wall. Local historian J.L. Bell explains that shoes and garments were sometimes hidden inside walls as houses were built in those days to ward off bad spirits. He opines that the shoes were probably put there during later additions to the house, not during original construction. The house is historical because it is where John Hancock and Samuel Adams were staying, hiding out from British authorities, at the time of the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
1. You almost certainly heard or read that California overturned its ban on same-sex marriage yesterday, becoming the second state in the country to permit legal marriage for gay couples (along with Massachusetts, of course). The decision is somewhat notable because the state’s Supreme Court is predominantly Republican, and you know how those Republicans hate The Gay.
It almost goes without saying that this breathes new life into the anti-gay activist crowd, but the L.A. Times said it anyway, and you can bet your bippy that Karl Rove is sitting in his underworld lair somewhere getting it all down on paper to use as a wedge issue for the fall campaign.
Meanwhile, I though Louis Bayard’s piece at Salon this morning was a nice bit from the point of view of a gay man who has always known what the Supreme Court of California apparently just discovered: that gay people live normal lives, raise normal families, and that most of them aren’t any different from most of us. It’s good that the law is on their side now, but it’s time to stop making such a big deal out of it.
I also liked this post at Beacon Broadside by author Patricia Gozember, which points out that same-sex marriage has been legal here in Massachusetts for more than four years now (wow!) and, contrary to the wild ravings of the right-wing fundie freakshow crowd, absolutely nothing bad has happened to any heterosexual marriage as a result, nor have people been marrying dogs or sheep or any of the other ridiculous claims made by those awful people.
I genuinely believe that eventually same-sex marriage will be legal in most states, even though it may take a long time to achieve.
Late last year, the FCC made a ruling that allowed for cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets in the same media market. This situation, traditionally known as “duopoly” in broadcast regulation lingo, was a strict no-no for decades. Despite the fact that 99% of the public response received by the FCC during their open comment period was opposed to rescinding duopoly, and despite a stern admonishment from Congress not to do it, the FCC did it anyway. After all, why listen to Congress when the media industry is paying you off on a regular basis, right? John Kerry (remember him, the guy who was too dull to be President…) marshalled the bill through the Senate, where it was passed by voice vote. The bill must still make it through the House, which shouldn’t be too much of a challenge, but will almost certainly be vetoed by George Bush. So it’s not a clean win, but it’s a very good start and shows that occasionally Washington listens to its constituents.
