Keep on the sunny side

I really am under the gun today and tomorrow, deadline-wise, but I did want to say something I was thinking about as I was driving home. And nearly colliding head-on with a truck because I was so lost in thought - and heat really gets to me.


Heaven forbid I should use the air conditioner in the Jetta! Or the one that's still sitting in the shed, for that matter ...


This whole blogging thing is very strange to me. I'm always writing stuff, changing it, deleting it, regretting it ...

But hey, I got a nice email from someone at the Richard III Society about my post on the Medieval king ...


So I'm watching the end of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" It's one of my favorite movies. And I figure that no matter what happens to those guys in the movie - all 4 of them - they stick together. They argue, they fight, one of them runs off when the goin' gets tough; but in the end, they are together.

Sort of like the book the movie's based on, I guess.

So here's to friendship, to bonhomie, and to my readers (even though I feel as if I'm sitting in a pub having a beer with them, and they've all got paper bags over their heads).

Hey, even in the movie, the guys are wearing disguises.

How fitting is all that? Sadly, the flood is about to come!

An extra-special book

A few weeks ago now, my friend Jennifer Karin Sidford gave me a copy of her new children's book.


It looked like a winner then, and it looks like a winner now that it's out in the shops.


The official storytelling launch party for The DreamStarter Book will be at 4 p.m. on Sunday (July 20) at Jabberwocky Bookshop in The Tannery (just about the best bookstore anywhere).

The DreamStarter Book contains 50 pages of story beginnings ... as in, Jennifer starts the story and the kids, with their parents, with whoever or alone, figure out where it goes from there.

In the first beginning, for example, a little boy looks in the mirror while brushing his teeth and sees a key inside the mirror. He reaches for the key, grabs the key and ... whee! You're off! (Her lead up is more expansive and literary than this, of course.)

All of the beginnings childhood imaginings and 'fears' ... castles, wolves, pirates, unicorns, dragons, Ninjas.


The Wolves of Scotland brought back memories of a book I read as a young adult, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, so when I read it, I actually started concocting a storyline to finish the story.

I think it's a great way to stimulate a child's imagination and maybe stimulate some future writers, as well as obviously interacting with your child(ren) in a meaningful way.


This is Jennifer's third published work. And no, she's not architect Andy Sidford's wife - she's married to Andy's twin, Chris. I just love that twin thing. Maybe Jennifer will write about it one day ...?


The DreamStarter Book

Cold Tree Press

Softcover; 63 pages (including ideas on how to use the book for activity time and as a game)

$12.95

Greenheads #1

OK, so the hottest topic on my blog today was this post about the (then) approaching greenhead season. No comments, but the most hits of any other individual post.

As anyone who reads regularly knows, the greenheads are now here. Right here, in my porch. All of them.

Triple-D was laughing her ass off at me from her deck yesterday as I was swatting madly at the greenheads congregated on the screen of one of the windows (most of the others along the front I don't open because there are no screens on them).

I like it when they congregate - sometimes I can kill several of them with one swat!

Fortunately, for whatever reason, they don't come all the way into the house. Unlike the horse flies, which are not easily killed with one blow from the swatter and in any case are much harder to catch off guard (so to speak). Greenheads are just plain dumb.

I usually have the attitude of "live and let live" with insects (as I already mentioned). But I can't abide flies. I heard somewhere the other day that they pee something like once every 5 seconds. I just love getting up on my stool and cleaning the fly specks off the (white) beams in the main room.

It's so attractive.

Patrick is personable

And in this - fuzzy - image, you can see some of our city officials who came out to Amesbury to hear the Governor.

Our mayor (with arms folded and wife Jeannie next to him), Ed Cameron, Donna Holaday, and Brian Derrivan peeking out from behind Amesbury Municipal Councilor Jonathan Sherwood (tall guy with red shirt, next to Donna Holaday). Also on hand were council President James Shanley and Councillor-at-Large Barry Connell - and Youth Services Director Andi Egmont with her cute doggie.

Oh, and the irrepressible Charlie Cullen, president/CEO of The Provident Bank.

State Rep. Mike Costello could not be there (health care being debated in the House), but you can sort of see his press guy, Fred Lucey, behind the mayor and Costello's father, Nick (former Amesbury everything), stood in for him.

State Sen. Stephen Baddour introduced the Governor, who took questions on issues ranging from same-sex marriage to funding for lung cancer research and prevention (the lack thereof).

He acquitted himself pretty well, joked around with the audience (noting to an audience member that the sun was in their eyes and did s/he want him to block it with his body? "I'm a full-service governor!")

He took a little jab at the press, noting that when he called a press conference to unveil the new life sciences initiative, the only question he got was asking him to comment on his new haircut, and that was what the next day's story was about - his haircut.

Read about the meeting tomorrow in the Daily News. Katie Farrell was there, taking copious notes, as was DN editor John Macone (I think it was John Macone - I was going to introduce myself as he was standing near Brian Derrivan, but he moved away when he saw me eyeing him. Wonder why that could be? heh)

I was covering this for the Merrimack Valley Magazine, by the way - but my little report won't come out 'til the Sept. issue.

Oh, yeah, one last thing - the Governor suggested to someone from Amesbury who was talking about the stalled development at the town's Lower Millyard that maybe the town could get help from someone who was helping Newburyport, "like Steve." It took me a few seconds to realize he meant Steve Karp.

Yikes.

"I ask you to rescind that designation!"

And with those words, Ron Klodenski opened a mini-floodgate of comments about our landfill to Gov. Deval Patrick, who was at an outdoor town hall meeting this evening in Amesbury.

With others calling out comments behind him, Klodenski responded to an earlier remark by Patrick that he is not a "strong arm" type of person.

"You said you're not a strong arm type of person - but we need you to strong arm your Department of Environmental Protection!" Klodenski began. He then asked the Governor to rescind the DEP's designation of the landfill as 21E.

With that designation by the DEP, any entity that ever dumped toxic materials at the landfill, which was once the city's dump, is liable for its cleanup.

"That's a fair and direct question," Patrick replied. "I am talking to our Massachusetts DEP. I think there is a solution here ... I will talk to the Mass. DEP myself."

Following the meeting, Ward 5 Councillor Brian Derrivan said that he thought it was best in a situation like this to let the residents voice their concerns to the Governor directly (the dump is in his ward). Derrivan sort of indicated that he expects something to happen on the landfill debacle sooner rather than later (I'm paraphrasing and extrapolating). Those legal fees are mounting up!

Well, but think about it, as I did while driving home. The court on Monday gave the city until January to make its case. And what I think I heard is that the preliminary injunction against Wood Waste Boston is for the company to clear out the Everett facility ASAP, as part of the same process.

So we know that New Ventures is kind of in a tough spot, and that this delay by the court seems to be more or less 'sticking it' to them ... doesn't it? New Ventures wants to cap the landfill by year's end ... or maybe I shouldn't have had that beer at the Barking Dog before the meeting!

But hold the phone! People on the Everett Average Citizen are saying if not Newburyport, Wood Waste/New Ventures will have to ship the crap stockpiled in Everett to Ohio.

That ain't going to be cheap.

It all sounds sort of hopeful to me. Let's keep our fingers crossed!

Lessons from Richard III

Are we - and I mean this globally - just way too gullible?

Last night, after finishing up my friend Anne Easter Smith's first novel, A Rose for the Crown (which I was reading for the second time), I began to think about the English King Richard III and how everyone believed, or still believes, Tudor propaganda about him more than 500 years later.

And I thought he would serve as a good example of bad marketing, while King Henry VII, who killed Richard in battle and seized the throne (with little or no actual right to it), would serve as a good example of good marketing, spin and PR in general. In fact, nearly the whole bunch of Tudor monarchs nearly re-wrote Medieval history in order to make themselves look better.

What do we know about Richard III?

That he was a hunchback. If you took any English history, you will have been told that he was a hunchback with a withered arm. I don't know exactly how those physical disabilities correlate to evil, but apparently they do. (This idea was probably helped along more recently by the German Kaiser Wilhelm, who was similarly afflicted with a withered arm.)

The words, "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" But wait, those words were penned by Shakespeare, who wrote during the reign of Elizabeth I, granddaughter of Henry VII.

He declared his two young nephews as bastards, which enabled him to grab up the throne for himself. Well, yeah ... but what if he really thought they were bastards (his older brother, Edward IV, had reportedly declared himself to another woman before marrying their mother)? The laws of succession were pretty clear about not letting illegitimate children inherit the throne.

Mostly, though we just know that he killed those two nephews, known as "The Princes in the Tower." Well, actually, that's still up for debate (and even if he did, that's what people did back then, as icky as it seems to us) - and if he did do it, why didn't the Tudors use that to generate hatred of Richard? (Hint: Henry VII had just as much, if not more, to fear from those Plantagenet heirs to the throne than did Richard.)

So what about written history? Can it be trusted?

Now we know that portraits of Richard were altered to make him look (more?) disabled and even untrustworthy, so people would loathe him throughout the centuries. Shades of Fox News here. We know that he was at least somewhat unfairly characterized as a villain by people in whose best interests it was to do so.

And it worked!

Meanwhile, Henry VII's son, Henry VII, is rather glorified, even though he killed off a couple of his six wives, all in the name of his Christian faith (or so he said).

Henry VIII, if historical accounts can be trusted, seems to have been quite the person. I would love to have met him (and still be here to report about it). He made totally arbitrary decisions, brooked no dissent, and believed everything he did was what God wanted him to do and therefore, he could make his own rules.

Hmmmm ... does any of this sound at all familiar?

I live in harmony with spiders

Wow, I've been busy today! A deadline today (which I'm having trouble meeting) and one Friday ... well, Sunday, anyway.

So I was just wandering around, collecting my thoughts and armed to the teeth - with my fly swatter. It is my constant companion.

Yesterday, I must have killed a dozen greenheads on the enclosed porch. Funny, I don't seem to encounter them outside. I try to catch and release whenever possible, but that doesn't work that well.

Oh, yeah! The spiders.

People entering my tiny abode may notice spider webs in corners and up in the peaked roof of the main room of the cottage. I used to tear them all down with a venom (pun intended, I guess).

Then I realized that the spiders, who leave me alone as long as I return the favor, love to dine on the bane of my existence in the summer, flies.

So, no, I do not kill spiders anymore, and I leave the webs intact where I can. I say that because, if my cat curls up for a nap, five minutes later there's a web going from him to the wall.

I'm exaggerating - but it's almost that bad.

Culture clash in the workplace: Gen. Y v. Boomers

This May 22 broadcast on WBUR-Boston (NPR) does a lot towards explaining my difficulties with my (ex) 20-something editor:

Twenty-somethings with iPods and attitude, ready to take on the world as they see it.

The early line on Generation Y? Ambitious, demanding, questioning everything, self-absorbed, multi-tasking, optimistic, and very-well pierced and tattooed. They change jobs like their parents changed clothes. They bring their own rules.

Some managers don't know what to do with them. Others say they may end up the highest-performing workforce in history.

Why do they seem to want too much from me, too soon? a manager asks. As "On Point" guest Nadira Hira explains, they are looking for mentoring (this is as the employee, not the boss) from the Boomers, because that's what they got from their parents.

According to Hira, boomers shouldn't be complaining about dealing with the "monsters" since we raised them to feel entitled and to question everything! (She has a cover story on this in Fortune magazine, as well as at least this piece. I can't find a link to the cover story.)

"In the real world, nobody cares if you got a straight A in the second-year English class," says Jason Ryan Dorsey, another guest and consultant on how to deal with employees of his generation. He goes on to say all a CEO wants to know is what you can add to the company, something he says a Gen. Y person might not get.

With parents touting their kids' achievements left and right, it's small wonder the kids think everyone should be impressed with them. It's a hard lesson to learn (the one that everyone is not).

Are they slackers, or are they hard workers? This is the question. I think that they are not slackers, but they are unrealistic - but I think they learned that from parents (and others) who got a lot really fast during the boom of the 1980s.

"I don't want to start from the bottom, and we've been told we don't have to," comments a 21-year old listener. In today's world, many of them don't have to; in this young man's case, since he's going into journalism, he probably WILL be an editor after 2 years.

And look at the models they came into adulthood with: people who made a lot of dough off Internet startup companies; YouTube, MySpace, etc.

One thing I agree with what the guests are saying is a Gen. Y trait is that a person can work from home, if it's appropriate to their position, and produce just as much, if not more. That's one thing my last employer really understood (but the one before that did not).

What I found most frustrating was how much time I spent explaining things, when I could have been working. As my supervisor, she pulled me away from my work much more than was necessary, as was commented upon by others in the office.

I was taught how to interact with adults who were not my parents/relatives ... and to work on my own, without benefit of input from an iPod or other people, until necessary (my parents didn't help me with my homework, for example).

They don't want to feel alone, agrees Hira, who says she can't walk down the street in New York City without using her cell phone because she doesn't want to feel alone.

The young guests also concede that many of their peers can't fill out job applications, they take their mom with them to job interviews, some of them can't tell time without the help of a digital display ...

What you see in the workplace is Gen. Yers interacting with Boomers the same way they interact with their parents, says Tamara Erickson, Consultant and Researcher on Gen. Y and changing workplace demographics.

"Why is the sky blue, Mr. (or Ms.) Boss?"

In the long run, however, what I get from this is that all the guests on this program were Gen. Y people, and they are obviously making a good living talking about - themselves.

And it's working to their advantage, as Boomers are getting the heck out of the workplace earlier and earlier - or having to pay consultants to tell them how to deal with employees who were raised to feel ... how? Neglected? Coddled?

Hira says she believes that things will even out more once her peers reach their 30s. Let's hope so, or within the next few years we'll have people running for President who are incapable of running the country without their mom being there in the Oval Office with them.

Or not being able to read the Doomsday Clock.

One mocks where one can

After the shock of having Bubba agree 100% with me about something wore off, I thought I'd better post about Newbury again - just to keep things on an even keel.

But dammit, all I can find is something that on the face of it looks pretty sensible. But I still have complaints and plenty of opportunities to mock.

PLUM ISLAND — Police will begin issuing short-term parking permits to people who rent cottages on Plum Island for vacations, the July 10 story in the Daily News begins.

Nowhere does it say this is just in the Newbury section of the island, or even if it's only on Northern Blvd. (the main drag to the northern end of the island, on the ocean side), but oh well. In fact, I don't think the word "Newbury" appears anywhere in the story ...

Under the new policy, which (Newbury police Chief Michael) Reilly said will take effect in about two weeks, renters will have the option of buying a permit that will allow them to park legally in areas where they would normally be liable for a $20 ticket.

The permits will cost $15.

The only problem left, according to the person who earlier today told me about this, is figuring out what happens when renters say the landlords should pay for the parking permits, not them. The story says the permits, which should be left on the dashboard of the vehicle, will have an expiration date.

Of what? Who knows?

Although the policy will initally (sic) cover only people renting cottages or houses on Plum Island, Reilly said in the future he would like to extend temporary permits to people holding weddings or parties on the island. The host, he said, could apply for one-day permits for a specified number of guests' vehicles.

I think that about 1/3 of the homes on Plum Island are actually in Newburyport, if I recall correctly. I know that Newbury and Newburyport have an inter-community agreement in which each community's PD patrols out here, but can some Newbury cop now come and ticket someone parked on Old Point Rd. (the main drag on this side of the island - actually, the ONLY drag - and who is parked in Newburyport but who does not have a permit on display?

It's all sooo confusing to me!

Dah-dum!

A (dead) great white shark has washed up on a Nantucket Beach, according to the Boston Globe and the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.

The carcass is the first to wash up on a Mass. beach in two decades.

The discovery of the young female shark follows a possible sighting by lifeguards last week on Martha's Vineyard's South Beach. Another sighting reported at the Vineyard's State Beach turned out to be a hoax.

So, you know? Where's there's a female shark there may also be ... little, biddy, budding big bad sharks. Not to be a living version of Chief Brody, but I would keep my eyes peeled while swimming or boating. They can jump up into boats, you know (did you not see the movie???).

Since I was (again) unable to upload the video from YouTube, check it out here.