No, seriously:

Just where is THE GLASS THANK YOU, anyway?

Stay classy, Cambridge eateries!

Burned into my brain forever:

It’s that time of year again: the Fluff Festival returns to Union Square, Somerville this Saturday, September 25 from 4-7 pm!

(language and content NSFW)

Apparently, Lombard Street was turned into CandyLand for a day.

What’s this?

A woman at Congressman Barney Frank’s Town Hall forum on health care reform referred to President Obama’s “Nazi plan” and asked Frank why he supported this “Nazi plan.” In his response, he snapped, “Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table.”

See it below on Larry King Live:

I’m a huge fan of Stamen Design out of San Francisco. One of the things they excel at is data-driven map presentations. And SF Crimespotting (pictured above) is a terrific example thereof!

I do a lot of map-based presentation, and I’ve leaned heavily on their work in the past (particularly their open-source project ModestMaps).

For those of you in the East Bay, you might also check out their original work in this genre, Oakland Crimespotting.

Stay safe!

Part 2 is still a work in progress. This is another multiple-exposure view from my back porch last night.

Newspaper article comments are the swamps of human intellect. Granted, some posts are thoughtful and respectful. But, taken in their aggregate… they simply make me despair being human.

Take the fabulous entry below. It was attached to an article about the Cambridge police officer, who arrested Henry Louis Gates, appearing on a Boston radio program the morning after President Obama called the officer’s actions “stupid.” (Backstory: Gates was arrested in his own home for creating a public disturbance; the police were called to the house by a neighbor who reported a possible break-in; Professor Gates was trying to force his front door open, because the lock had broken; the police demanded to see ID, Gates bitched him out and demanded his name and badge number, and the cop arrested him.)

So now, here’s poster #205, on the article about the radio show interviewing the cop and discussing Obama’s comment:

I am sad to say that I voted for him. Now I regret it. If America knows whats (sic) best for them they will make sure he is not re-elected. He pops off at the mouth and thinks he dosn’t (sic) have to answer for it because he is President. Sorry but last time I checked this is a democracy not communism! I am so disgusted in Obama! Where was it Kentucky that he sent his goons after the Governer (sic) to shut him up or they get nothing!!!! Ok Hitler!!!!

Posted by Lisa July 23, 09 12:05 PM

Writing in Vanity Fair, Nina Munk explores Harvard’s staggering endowment losses in Fiscal 2009 (the amount they lost that year is about DOUBLE the total amount of the endowment in 1993):

last December [2008], the university sold $2.5 billion worth of bonds, increasing its total debt to just over $6 billion…

To be clear, even if you’d tried hard, you could not have picked a worse time to sell bonds than December 2008; that was the precise moment when credit markets seized up. But Harvard, it seems, had no choice. Unwilling to sell its assets at fire-sale prices, it needed immediate cash to cover, among other things, what my sources say was approximately a $1 billion unrealized loss from interest-rate swaps…

Those swaps, put in place under Harvard’s then president, Lawrence “Larry” Summers, in the early 2000s, were intended to protect, or hedge, the university against rising interest rates on all the money it had borrowed. The idea was simple: if interest rates went up, the swaps would bring in enough money to cover Harvard’s higher debt payments.

Instead, interest rates went down. And for reasons no one can explain to me, even as interest rates were plunging in 2007 and 2008, the university simply forgot, or neglected, or chose not to cancel its swaps—with the result that Harvard wound up facing that $1 billion loss! Whose responsibility was that? Where were Harvard’s chief financial officer and treasurer while all this was going on?

When you remember that the so-called “Masters of the Universe” and “financial wizards” who run Wall Street and the world’s major corporations are educated at places like The Big H… maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising that The Big H itself was the biggest financial loser in the latest round of global economic catastrophe.