A couple of months ago we snapped the photos below of Boston sports radio station WBZ-FM 98.5 The Sports Hub’s street team heading west on the Massachusetts Turnpike. The photographer tells me the driver in one of the vehicles laughed at the attention and also that there were hot [...]
In 2006 Massachusetts progressives carried a sub-prime mortgage lender to victory in the state’s gubernatorial election, essentially heralding the collapse of the mortgage bubble. One wonders what disaster their choice of candidate in the senate race will foretell?
[...]The payroll and employment report from Bureau of Labor Statistics for November 2009 suggest that the US economy is entering a so-called V-shaped recovery, rather than a slower and more painful U- or W-shaped one.
Not only were only 11,000 jobs lost last month, the figure for October was revised upwards. [...]
Life can get boring if one demands a plethora of data points on which to base trend spotting so let’s just assume that the overnight ratings success of WBZ-FM 98.5 The Sports Hub in Boston heralds a wide spread migration from AM to FM by talk-driven radio. After all, one [...]
An interesting nugget from the student poverty rate for school districts in Massachusetts that I posted yesterday: Boston’s 2008 population is listed as 625,000, about 12,000-16,000 more than the usual Federal population estimates for the city, and about 35,000 more than in 2000, yet less than the 630,000 that [...]
Last week the United States Census Bureau released student poverty rates for school districts in the United States. Below are the numbers for school districts in Massachusetts. You can view and order the statistics for districts in all states here.
A couple of weeks ago the United States Census Bureau released results from the 2008 American Community Survey. The survey results suggest that Boston had a majority-white population in 2008. Ad the tables below illustrate Boston’s population remains about half white, half non-white, as the case has been for several [...]
' [...] The New England Patriots offensive linemen in 2009 and the different combinations of starters the team uses:
New England Patriots starting offensive linemen by game in 2009 Week Left Tackle Left Guard Center Right Guard Right Tackle 1 vs Buffalo Bills Matt Light Logan Mankins Dan Koppen Stephen Neal Nick Kaczur 2 @ New York Jets 3 vs Atlanta Falcons 4 vs Baltimore Ravens 5 @ Denver [...]I took a stroll down Newbury Street in Back Bay in Boston the day before Independence Day. It was a beautiful day and Newbury Street was the bustling happening street one would expect it be, but there were also rather sad signs of the recession stumbling through. Blow are pictures [...]
104.1 WBCN - the self-proclaimed Rock of Boston - will soon be moved from terrestrial glory to the Internet graveyard, as originally reported by Adam Reilly on his media blog at ThePhoenix.com. The station’s owner CBS is moving Mix (WBMX) from its current signal 98.5 to WBCN’s. 98.5 will [...]
I ran a small handful of keyword searches that are near and dear to me in Microsoft’s new search engine Bing today and found that the gossip section in the Boston Herald, the Inside Track Gals, used one of my pictures on May 11 to illustrate some item related to [...]
A couple of months ago I quoted a local politician in Sweden recounting how government revenue projections are repeatedly revised downwards because of the terrible toll the recession in the United States is taking on the global economy’s export-driven participants. The local newspaper in my native city reports this [...]
A picture of a Target Assets Protections tricycle personnel carrier at the Target store in Watertown. I don’t know whether it’s a souped up pimped Segway or some kind of electric vehicle. I have to say it’s more stylish than the plain vanilla segways that mall cops ride. Target wins [...]
some nitwit who copied passages because the idea of writing was more appealing than the writing itself.
Udolpho.com on Ben Domenech, 3/26/2006
New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd (461) has gotten herself into a pinch by lifting a paragraph written by blogger Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo fame [...]
Peacuddy’s Cafe & Bakery in Melrose - a rather pleasant town north of Boston - is a terrific little place to have a cup of coffee and something to eat (Peacuddy’s serves Rao’s so you know the coffee is good). They have great cookies, too.
[...]Massachusetts instituted universal health care in 2006 which has led to longer wait times to see a doctor according to survey that Boston Globe reports on today. The promise of universal health care is that it will reduce cost by expanding preventative care to a larger share of population. [...]
New England Patriots tight end David Thomas is preparing for what is likely going to be his last training camp with the team. Hope springs eternal in the off season, as the Boston Globe’s Christopher L. Gasper reminds us:
One advantage for Thomas is that for the first time since [...]
Going to the ball game
leaving work early
sitting in a back up
stuck on Storrow Drive
Get honked at
Get yelled at
Get cut off
price gouged
Get blocked in
Get ticketed
I tell you, fans, it’s harder than it looks
it’s a long way to Fenway Park when Boston Red [...]
Metro USA has been sold by its Swedish owner to a company called Seabay Media, which is headed by Metro’s former CEO, Pelle Tornberg (Törnberg in Swedish) who’s widely regarded as the newspapers founder. Metro’s American newspapers have a week-daily circulation of 590,000 and supposedly snag 1.2 million readers in [...]
A photograph of a sign in a Pottery Barn Kids store at Burlington Mall in Burlington, Massachusetts:
Are they sure it’s “”their” space” and not “their “space”?”
…as long as it isn’t a spelling beeHere’s a sign from a CVS store in Winchester in Massachusetts:
A question [...]
It was only recently that the New England Patriots started using Twitter to communicate with the team’s fans but they are now fully embracing so-called micro-blogging as a way to communicate with the fans.
Realpatriots is the team’s main account. PATRIOTSdotCOM is announces new material on the Patriots web site. PatriotPlace [...]
The New York Times reports on stagnating test scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress:
Despite gains that both whites and minorities did make, the overall scores of the United States’ 17-year-old students, averaged across all groups, were the same as those of teenagers who took the test in [...]
Massachusetts State Legislature has produced a veto-proof majority to increase the state’s sales tax from 5% to 7% to help meet the projected deficit in the state budget.
The pros and cons of tax hikes versus deficit spending versus budget cuts are well established, as are the pros and cons of [...]
The 2009 NFL draft is over. The New England Patriots picked four players in the second round after trading out of the first round entirely, two in the third, one in the fourth, and one in the fifth, two in the sixth and [...]
Interesting nugget from British retail giant Tesco’s take on the global economy,as reported by the Wall Street Journal (subscription may be required):
One exception to the trend [of "upswing in consumer sentiment"], Tesco said, was the Western U.S. Tesco’s stores in Southern California, Phoenix and Las Vegas have been hit [...]
Patriot Place, the retail center next to the New England Patriots home field Gillette Stadium, is working pretty hard to drum up business. On Patriots Day, April 20 - which has nothing to do with the Patriots - shoppers were allowed to walk across the field at the stadium, the [...]
Everybody’s favorite Cambridge radio station, WJIB 740-AM, is mentioned and its owner Bob Bittner quoted in an article in today’s Wall Street Journal on commercial radio stations asking listeners for contributions (subscription may be req.). The article points to the dramatic decline in radio advertising revenue (-9% in [...]
Would it have killed the Boston Globe’s Maria Sachetti to interview an American whose been hurt or had a relative killed by an illegal alien in an auto accident? Does she only interview people who are provided to her by amnesty advocates? Why didn’t she define what constitutes a [...]
Here’s a screenshot of a Google Maps search I found in the traffic log:
As you can see, the search for ‘”Public Garden” in pennsylvaniA’ threw Google for a bit of a [...]
The Boston University Terriers national champion men’s ice hockey team spent an hour and change signing autographs for the hundreds of fans who showed up at the GSU today. I stood in line for about 45 minutes before I reached the table where the players were signing merchandise [...]
The Boston Globe’s Megan Woolhouse has an article today on how that shortage of nurses that had politicians and hospital directors scrambling to bring in as many foreign nurses as possible predictably has turned into a shortage of jobs for nurses.
Writes Woolhouse:
When Katharine Barron enrolled in Boston College’s school [...]
New England Patriots 2009 Regular Season Record: 0-0
New England Patriots 2009Thousands of Boston University students, faculty members and alumni greeted the BU Terriers 2009 national championship ice hockey team as it paraded in duck boats from Kenmore square to Marsh Plaza, where the victory parade turned into a rally. Here are some photos from the event:
[...]
The Boston University Terriers trailed by 2 with a minute to go in the 2009 NCAA men’s ice hockey national championship game and it seemed as if their promising season would come to a soul-crushingly disappointing end. The Terriers were clearly the better team but had made so many mistakes [...]
It’s a good thing the Boston Red Sox have a $200 million payroll otherwise they might have been 0-3.
The Sox strand more people in one game than Lost does in all seasons put together.
Jed Lowrie is so unclutch he should be called Mr. Automatic.
Thank God the NFL draft is only [...]
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has released an immigrant from Sweden who was convicted of felony murder of a local police officer in California and sentenced to life in prison in 1983. The woman has reportedly been deported to her native country.
Dan Kennedy, March 13, 2009:
If being cautiously optimistic about the future of the Globe makes me hopelessly naive, then I offer my deepest apologies.
Dan Kennedy, April 3, 2009:
I am told the Times Co. is serious as a heart attack regarding its threat to close the paper.
[C]an [...]
“Documentary and stock transfer tax” receipts collected by state governments illustrate the growth and collapse of the debt-fueled real estate bubble.
The figures below are for Massachusetts (MA) and the total for the fifty states (US) 2001 - 2008. Keep in mind that the figures are based on the states’ own [...]
As I recommended some time ago Massachusetts is taking steps to increase lottery revenue, although in a less straightforward manner than I suggested, and more in line with what Cleary Squared outlined last winter.
(Globe link Via Universal Hub)
[...]Not so natural conservatives. Can somebody tell Karl Rove?
[...]The United States Census Bureau has released county population estimates for 2008. The new population statistics show that metropolitan Boston had a population of 4,522,858, compared to 4,392,345 in 2000, making it America’s tenth most populous metropolitan area.
Middlesex county in Massachusetts remains America’s 22nd most populous county with 1,482,478 [...]
Boston Globe reporter John S. Canellos is moved by a segment on a cable comedy show to proclaim that traditional news media - the mainstream media, if you will - “should live up to its own ideals” and not be duped by life’s many hawkers and peddlers. That’s rather [...]
Boston sports talk radio station WEEI has launched a new and much improved web site with a ton of content form the show, original content for the site, AP reports and other third-party material. Very nice work. Most room for improvement is on the team pages which right now [...]
The hallmark of a look-at-me sports columnist is the ability to base criticism not only on nothing but on assertions that run against known facts. Kansas City Star’s Jason Whitlock makes a hedged but still ridiculous accusation against the Kansas City Chiefs General Manager Scott Pioli after the team [...]
Revenue is dropping like a rock for governments at all levels in the United States and it isn’t any better in the countries that used to rake in the dough exporting to ever more leveraged consumers in the US. Here’s how an experienced city-level politician in Sweden describes this year’s [...]
WJIB AM 740, the memories Station, Boston’s home of the Beautiful Music, finally has a web site, WJIB740.com.
The Cambridge, MA, station is also in the midst of its fund-raising drive. WJIB, which plays “a pleasant mix of 30’s-through-60’s ‘adults-standards’ and softer hits from the 50’s through-80’s,” is funded [...]
Let’s spend the revenue from Governor Subprime Patrick’s carbon-usage fee on snow removal.
[...]Boston and surrounding areas were hit by a somewhat unimpressive Nor’easter today that dumped several inches of beautiful, fluffy white snow. Since the forecast had been for an End-of-Earth-like 12-18 inches schools had been closed and most people stayed at home. Below are a few pictures from the snow-besieged city, [...]
Michale Hill of the Associate Press does a good job of describing the fiscal mess states got themselves into by acting as if the revenue windfall during the debt-fueled housing bubble was a new state of normal that would last forever:
The decline in state tax revenue is expected to [...]
New England Patriots decision to trade veteran outside linebacker Mike Vrabel and backup quarterback Matt Cassel to Kansas City Chiefs for a second round pick in the 2009 draft has quite simply stunned many Patriots fans. So convinced were many fans that Cassel is a worth a first-round pick [...]
Here’s a handful of pictures from Boston University Terriers‘ 7-2 dismantling of UMass at Agganis Arena. The Boston Globe’s Nancy Marrapese-Burrell has a good write-up of the game. What I would add to it is that UMass scored its first goal after a BU defenseman fell when he [...]
It was last year that immigration expansionist would go on and on about how America needs to bering in a million or two foreigner workers every year to fill the jobs Americans won’t do. It was an absurd argument then and it’s been a completely absurd argument since the first [...]
In the article Broken Homes in the winter issue of Left-leaning Massachusetts think-tank MassINC’s magazine CommonWealth, Michael Jonas attempts to describe the effect of sub-prime lending on urban neighborhoods. The article jumps off with the familiar story of a person who probably should not have received a huge mortgage [...]
Maura Banta, a manager at IBM and also chairwoman of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, argues in an op-ed the Boston Globe for the incorporation of so-called “21st Century skills” in “the K-12 curriculum in Massachusetts.” I think at least part of her argument is that [...]
The Boston Fed, the entity that set off the chain of events that just about destroyed the world’s financial system, has a new idea on how to distort the real-estate market: If you can’t make your mortgage payments on your figuratively under-water home because of “income disruptions” Uncle Sam [...]
Police suspect members of something called Global Intifada of having set fires in several grocery stores in Sweden that sell U.S. products (I can’t imagine there being many stores that don’t). Time for President Barack Obama to go Swedish television and display his usual rhetorical brilliance. You know, “We can [...]
A few days ago I watched No Reservations and it struck me that it is quite a bit better than critics would have made you believe when it was released in 2007. A couple of days after watching No reservations I saw Definitely, Maybe. While I by and large enjoyed [...]
Popular social networking site FaceBook offers advertisers the ability to geo target ads. How accurate is the site’s geo-targeting? I think it’s reasonable to say that it is opaqueishly somewhatish accurate.
Let’s have a look at the population and the number of active FaceBook users in Boston and a surrounding group [...]
The Boston Globe reports on a Moody’s study that estimates that Massachusetts will receive about $11 billion from 2/3 of the enormous borrow-and-spend bill that President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress majority is pushing. The $11 billion would “would save or create 94,560 jobs in Massachusetts.”
That’s weak. Massachusetts [...]
Today the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the second quarter 2008 numbers for “establishments, employment, and wages” in the 335 largest counties. Here are the numbers for the relevant counties in Massachusetts:
| County | Est. | Empl. | %ch. | Rank | Wage | %ch. | Rank |
| Barnstable | 9.2 | 101.4 | -1.6 | 259 | 725 | 2.5 | 166 |
| Bristol | 15.5 | 221.4 | -1.4 | 246 | 773 | 2.4 | 175 |
| Essex | 20.9 | 305.6 | 0.0 | 126 | 902 | 2.7 | 145 |
| Hampden | 14.3 | 202.2 | -0.5 | 182 | 766 | 2.4 | 175 |
| Middlesex | 47.5 | 834.5 | 0.8 | 67 | 1,240 | 5.2 | 19 |
| Norfolk | 23.3 | 329.6 | -0.5 | 182 | 1,013 | 2.7 | 145 |
| Plymouth | 13.8 | 180.7 | -1.0 | 215 | 829 | 3.1 | 117 |
| Suffolk | 21.7 | 596.6 | 0.9 | 60 | 1,309 | 2.2 | 194 |
| Worcester | 20.6 | 324.9 | -1.2 | 232 | 869 | 3.3 | 94 |
Est. is the number of establishments in the second quarter of 2008, Empl. the number of employees in June [...]
Metropolitan unemployment rates in Massachusetts in November 2008. These rates are not seasonally adjusted.
| MSA | Nov 2008 |
Oct 2008 |
Nov 2007 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Barnstable Town | 6.5 | 5.0 | 4.2 |
| Boston-Cambridge-Quincy | 5.0 | 4.6 | 3.6 |
| Leominster-Fitchburg-Gardner | 7.1 | 6.4 | 4.7 |
| New Bedford | 7.9 | 7.3 | 5.5 |
| Pittsfield | 5.2 | 4.4 | 3.5 |
| Springfield | 6.2 | 5.6 | 4.4 |
| Worcester | 5.9 | 5.4 | 4.2 |
What’s this Boston-Cambridge-Quincy?
Unemployment rates in all metropolitan areas in the United States.
[...]Arizona Cardinals iced their Wild Card play-off victory over the visiting Atlanta Falcons when tight end Stephen Spach caught a third-down-and-16 pass for 23 yards and a new set of downs that allowed the Cardinals to kneel out the clock.
So that’s this is what it feels like when your team fails to make the playoffs.
The New England Patriots took care of their business in their frantic late season push for a playoff spot but so did the other teams who ere in the mix. Baltimore Ravens pasted the Jacksonville [...]
Massachusetts population was 6,497,967 on July 1 according to the latest population estimate by the United States Census Bureau. The population has increased 2.34% since 2000, the ninth slowest increase (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing). The new estimates also bring with them upwards estimates for the population [...]
This Boston Globe article on the president of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank Eric Rosengren is beyond absurd. Rosengren’s been pushing policies to prop up the artificial pay-check destroying run-up in prices in 2006 and 2007 and on top of that he comes across as a run of the [...]
I’m putting all links, observations and commentary regarding the Madoff mess in this post. It started off as a throwaway political one-liner but has since grown, initially because of the Madoff debacle’s impact on Boston. While I very rarely put a post in more than one category I have [...]
New England Patriots concluded their second West Coast road trip of the 2008 season by pounding the Oakland Raiders 49-26. The game was never close but the fireworks was pretty entertaining at times, including touchdowns on three straight plays (not counting point after touchdown kicks). Patriots runningback LaMont Jordan ran [...]
That “all the rational people” supported President-elect Barack Obama in the 2008 election was one of Jack Beatty’s main points at the post-election forum I attended last month. The specific people he was referring to were hedge fund managers, that is, people like Bernard Madoff and his customers.
[Saturday [...]
The United States Census Bureau has released data that does the kind of cross-source referencing that the Bureau usually warns again. The table below shows the school districts in Massachusetts ranked by poverty rate (as calculated by me, dividing the number of students who live in households below the federal [...]
Amy Sullivan’s now infamous line - “[t]he jab was based on an outdated caricature of Chicago” - is the kind of ideologically motivated feigned ignorance that permeates Time and Newsweek magazines and made me stop reading them years ago.
[...]I checked out the PFW in Progress podcast for the first times in several weeks - my previous routine of listening to the show regularly having been disrupted by the kind of events life sometimes throws at you - and quickly learned that the cuts down at Gillette Stadium that [...]
America’s mayors want President-elect Barack Obama to throw them a $73 billion bone, according to ABC News:
According to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, there are 11,391 infrastructure projects ready to go in 427 cities across the United States. The conference estimates that these projects represent an infrastructure investment of [...]
Starting next week Starbucks will cut 2 hours of labor from each store each day.
[...]President elect Barack Obama in his December 7, 2008, video address:
Today, I am announcing a few key parts of my plan. First, we will launch a massive effort to make public buildings more energy-efficient. Our government now pays the highest energy bill in the world. We need to change [...]
Today we took the kid to the annual Swedish Christmas fair in Boston, as always held in the Cyclorama in South End, and as usual on the same day that Army and Navy battle it out on national television. Those crazy Swedes. Anyway, we had a good time and I [...]
[For some reason I just can't go to sleep (must be nervousness over Army-Navy - Go Army! Sink Navy!) so I started playing with some data that the Census Bureau has published. The table below is just a first stab, there will be more. Update: I added a second table [...]
As expected, the City of Boston’s challenge of the 2007 population estimate by the United States Census Bureau was a partial success. The initial estimate was 599,351 - while the 2007 American Community Survey guesstimated 613,117 - and the revised population estimate for Boston in 2007 is 608,352. [...]
The table below shows the contributions to and benefit payments from the state unemployment insurance systems in thousands of dollars in the 50 states (it also has the totals for the 50 states just for the heck of it) in fiscal year 2007. The data is from the Census Bureau’s [...]
From a Boston Globe article on the suspected murder of a one-year old child in Worcester:
[Suspect Nga] Truong, a junior at South Community High School, lives with her mother, 31-year-old Van Truong, a year-old brother, another brother three years her junior, and a boyfriend of seven months, Edwin Vasquez, [...]
Radio station call letters are an interesting case of functionality defeating form with amusing outcomes, possibilities and improbabilities in tow.
Radio stations east of the Mississippi start with a W while those west of the mighty river start with K.
If I tell you there’s a country station in Houston [...]
New England Patriots 10-33 loss at home to the Pittsburgh Steelers underscore how average the Brady-less and defensively personnel depleted Patriots are. Had they played a tougher schedule this year they would be lucky to be a .500 team at this point given the circumstances they’ve battled this season. There’s [...]
Boston greatly enjoyed the 35th annual Tuba Christmas concert at Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market in downtown Boston today. Scores of tuba players served up Christmas classics for a crowd of hundreds of afternoon shoppers. The weather was a little bit chilly but entirely bearable. Tubachristmas is a nationwide event that [...]
The United States Census Bureau has released the 2007 Survey of State Government Finances which includes data on revenue generated by state lotteries.
While Massachusetts is an acknowledged - even envied - world-leader in scratch tickets it’s not very good at actually fleecing its citizens. After prizes and administration has [...]
For a man who has a poker up his rear-end over bottled water, Boston’s Mayor Thomas M. Menino doesn’t mind using Polar Beverages to drive visitors to Downtown Crossing (don’t forget to wear your stab-proof kevlar vest if you go!). Suburban shoppers can find $1-off coupons for Polar Beverages products [...]
Yards, penalties, and most importantly points: New England Patriots piled up all of them on the road against the Miami Dolphins, exacting revenge for the embarrassing loss at home in week 3 of the 2008 season.
New England accumulated 530 yards of offense, 38 penalty yards and 48 points.
Quarterback Matt Cassel [...]
Ho-hum. The New England Patriots once again have three tight ends on their roster after having gone through most of the season with only two, Benjamin Watson and David Thomas. The newcomer is Tyson DeVree, an undrafted free agent out of Colorado. DeVree is said to be primarily a receiving [...]
Boston Globe is now Twittering the world its headlines (it has been for quite some time but now loudly and proudly). The feed distinguishes between Globe headlines and Boston.com ones.
[...]
Bass Pro - known from the famous jingle “The Best Gillette Can Get” - has a tremendous Christmas tree at its Patriots Place store. That store is a great shopping experience.
[...]If you insist on using WordPress for your website I encourage you to take a few minutes to make the following minor changes to your installation:
1) Change the h1 tag in the header div to a non-H tag.
2) Change the H2 tag on the single-post page to H1.
3) Get rid [...]
Last night I attended a forum of sorts where Jack Beatty (whose work at NPR and The Atlantic you or may not be familiar with) was the featured speaker and the audience had a decidedly left-ward tilt.
The near consensus was that:
1) The real John McCain would have been a [...]
In the immortal word of Paul Perillo: MAYO!
Yes, New England Patriots inside linebacker Jerod Mayo had a great game, a truly great game, against the New York Jets, but otherwise there wasn’t much to be upbeat about as the Patriots stumbled to a 34-31 overtime loss against the New York [...]
I read there was a bit of an awkward moment at a press confrence at the gathering of GOP governors (of which there are only 21 these days, which is terrible).
Reports Celeste Katz from Daily News:
When asked if [Alaska governor Sarah] Palin was the best choice McCain could have [...]
I know the question has been nagging you: Did Boston get around to challenge the United States Census Bureau’s 2007 population estimate for the city, the way it did for the 2005 and 2006 estimates? The answer is yes. I’m guessing the City requested a boost from 599,351 to at [...]
Barack Obama’s victory speech certainly didn’t give any hints about what policies he will pursue as President of the United States of America.
I don’t know about you but I thought the potential power of the moment was weakened by the fact that he’s been almost a shoo-in to win ever [...]
