NOT TO MENTION THAT FAMOUS FRENCH STENCH
5 years ago
May 23, 2003 | Steve Almond asked that Bush and Co. consider invading France.
“What the Bush regime needs to realize (and I think, deep down, it does) is that Americans are ready for a war against France. The recent squabble over Iraq is really just a symptom of a bone-deep, longstanding hatred between these two nations.

“I would remind those of you with a less-than-awesome historical grasp which side France supported in the Civil War...

“Maybe more important, France — and, more specifically, the French — are really annoying. A brief list of annoying things the French do:

1) Speak French. Spanish I could see, because Spanish is useful. The only reason to speak French is some lame effort to impress chicks.
2) Make depressing films. What is it about this whole cinéma de bummer? Are these people allergic to fun? Do they assume that doom and gloom automatically convey depth of intellect? And, if so, how does one explain the Jerry Lewis thing?
3) Sell weapons. If anyone’s going to be selling weapons to unstable despotic rulers, it’s the US of A. Got it?” Read Full Article

UNSEND MY HEART
10 years ago
May 22, 1998 | Ellen Barry discovered that technology brings nuance back into our lives.
“The world changed the first time someone wrote down a domain name on a cocktail napkin. When I realized this had begun to happen, it was at the end of a long party in a strange part of town, and I had an icy feeling that the exploratory phone call had been replaced by an exploratory e-mail. I was right. Over the past year or so, my friends and I have spent untold hours trying

“For one thing, we have been forced to develop a whole new repertoire of passionate gesture. The moment of slit-eyed fury when you delete a name from your address book! The terror of realizing it's too late to unsend! The new romantic clichés: the relationships that lived and died without face-to-face contact! The ability to document every tiny shift in dynamics! The condensed time scale! The subject line!” Read Full Article

CONFESSIONS OF A PÂTÉ GIRL
20 years ago
May 20, 1988 | According to Caroline Knapp, growing up in Cambridge could be both a privilege and a curse.
“Ah, growing up in Cambridge.

“A New Yorker subscription to go along with your birth certificate. A special set of bumper stickers for your first red wagon: BORN TO BE IN THERAPY and I BREAK FOR LIBERALS. And, along the privileged path that eases you from one higher-than average student/teacher ratio to the next (private kindergarten, private elementary school, private prep school, and thank-God-Dad-paid-for-this private college) a procession of strange contradictions. You eat tofu with your turkey at Christmas, which explains the tendency among some of your childhood friends to rebel by becoming Republicans. You are introduced to pâté and public television before you learn about Coke or cartoons…And, like people from hometowns everywhere, you end up, oh, a little screwed-up.”

SPY GAME
35 years ago
May 22, 1973 | In the wake of the Watergate scandal, Martin Lomansey Jr. talked to local campaign spy, "Thomas.”
“ ‘The trouble with those guys,’ says Thomas, ‘is that they got caught. You’d think they teach them better at the CIA, wouldn’t you?’ Thomas, who now works in state government as a reward for good and faithful service to a prominent elected official during a recent election, finds the failure of the Gemstone team the most repugnant aspect of the Watergate affair. He simply cannot believe that the men who planned and executed the break-in and related espionage could be as stupid as they were.

“ ‘I was only almost caught once,’ he recalls. ‘Back in 1971 I broke into a campaign trailer of Louise Day Hicks for ---------. Someone saw me and I almost got nailed. Even then I managed to get away with some good stuff and still make it look like a burglary not anything political.’ It was a break-in that received some coverage from the local press - a mayoral campaign sidebar at most. No one attributed anything political to it. And it is doubtful that Hicks ever suspected who did it. Thomas remained a top campaign aide to the very end.” Read Full Article

5/22/2008 4:31:32 PM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

BAD TIMES
5 years ago
May 16, 2003 | Dan Kennedy called for “tougher standards” in journalism in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal.
“Yet by purging Blair, it would be wrong to think that all is now well at the Times, or in journalism. Tougher standards are needed. We all deserve better. I was struck by a comment that Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center...at Harvard’s Kennedy School, made to USA Today. Jones noted that in the Times’ self-examination, the family of former POW Jessica Lynch and others said they were well aware that Blair had falsely claimed to interview them...But they didn’t complain to the Times because they didn’t expect any better of the media. ‘They didn’t say, ‘Holy cow,’ this is somebody who is clearly unscrupulous.’ Instead, their response was to shrug their shoulders and say, ‘Hey, what did you expect?’ ’ Jones was quoted as saying.” Read Full Article

GOOD RIDDANCE
10 years ago
May 15, 1998 | Matt Ashare presented the 1998 BMP award for Best National Act to Radiohead.
“For a band whose career in the US was launched in 1993 with the kind of perilously catchy...single that can easily kill a band's career by marking them as a one-hit wonder, England's Radiohead have truly come a long way. Sure, ‘Creep’ was great the first dozen times you heard it, but you can't blame Thom Yorke for not wanting to sing it anymore...Johnny Greenwood hated the song so much from the get-go that he tried to muck it up with those cacophonous false starts on his guitar...But Yorke, Greenwood, and the rest of the band refused to be defeated by success, returning in '95 with The Bends (Capitol), a disc...with absolutely no ‘Creep,’ a disc as complex as ‘Creep’ was simple...

“The Bends in all its convoluted glory was really just a twisted prelude to OK Computer (Capitol), which arrived last summer with nothing resembling a workable single and very little in the way of a coherent lyric. Majestic probably doesn't begin to describe the operatic scope of the album, but it's not a bad place to start...So now some of the same critics who wrote the band off after ‘Creep’ hit the charts are holding Radiohead up as modern-rock saviors, which they probably are.” Read Full Article

SELECTIVE LISTENING
30 years ago
May 16, 1978 | After having had bad experiences with living arrangements due to his musical pursuits, pianist Paul Raeburn seemed to have found the perfect situation.
“Not too long ago, I thought I had solved all my problems. I had an apartment to myself (no roommates to worry about). It was on the second floor (not too difficult to get the piano in and out). And the downstairs neighbors never complained. I could never quite understand why they never complained, but I was happy to let the matter rest.

“In fact, so tolerant were the neighbors that they allowed several people to enter the apartment one weekend when I was away and help themselves. When I returned, I found that the burglars had chopped a large hole in the door, upended the dresser, pried into a locked metal file cabinet, strewn clothes and books everywhere, and the neighbors, bless their hearts, had never said a word. Stereo, television, tape recorder, typewriter, piano amplifier...had been removed. Miraculously, the piano stood in the center of the living room. (I don’t blame the thieves for not taking it—I know how difficult it is to get it down the stairs.)” Read Full Article

THE HAVES AND THE HAVE-SHOTS
35 years ago
May 15, 1973 | George Kimball pointed out the differences between those folks sitting in the grandstand and the clubhouse and those in the infield at the Kentucky Derby.

“If you are a Governor or a Mayor or a Newspaper Editor or a Kentucky Colonel or if you just happen to have a lot of money or happen to be on intimate terms with somebody who has a lot of money or even somebody whose family once had a lot of money then you will wind up in the grandstand, the clubhouse, or in one of those boxes near the finish line which run about $50,000 for Churchill Downs’ 50 yearly racing days but which are rarely used save on Derby Day...

“If, on the other hand, you (a) have developed a tolerance for claustrophobia, (b) loved Woodstock, (c) have an aberrant penchant for attending spectacles you are unable to see, (d) drink a lot, and (e) don’t have the money or the connections for a seat, you will end up in the infield.”

5/16/2008 2:53:25 PM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

WEST ROAST
5 years ago
May 9, 2003 | Jay Jaroch mused on the bi-coastal lifestyle and the differences between West and East Coasters.
“Sure, it’s been new and exciting, but when you grow up East Coast you learn that you should never take yourself too seriously — unless, of course, you have a graduate degree. Take yourself too seriously, and you can be sure your friends will soon be mocking you right back down to earth: ‘Bill, you’re a systems analyst and you live in Malden. Take the leather pants off.’

“People in Los Angeles don’t discourage that kind of behavior; rather, they climb over each other to emulate it. If Jay-Z appeared in a video with his face dotted with bits of tissue he’d used to clot his shaving mistakes, the next day you’d see Scotties-spotted hipsters on the streets of LA wondering if the mistakes go better with their pants’ legs up or down.” Read Full Article

END GAMES
10 years ago
May 8, 1998 | Dan Tobin pitched alternative endings for Seinfeld.
“ 4. The Force
An anonymous letter reveals that Jerry’s Floridian folks are not his true birth parents. Instead, Newman is Jerry’s real father. “Search your feelings -- you know it to be true,” says Newman, sounding much like James Earl Jones as he nibbles at a Snickers bar. “Oh, hello, father,” Jerry responds snidely. The letter goes on to explain that Elaine is Jerry’s twin sister, and soon the gang is reunited on Riker’s Island as the twins are incarcerated on multiple counts of incest.

5. Nothing happens
Proving that Seinfeld is indeed a show about nothing, the last 15 minutes are just dead air. It’s the least grating 15 minutes in the series’s history.”
 
READING REAGAN
20 years ago
May 6, 1988| Francis J. Connolly interviewed local astrologer extraordinaire Cosmic Muffin, a/k/a Darrell Martinie about the revelation that Ronald Reagan had been consulting astrologers.
“Q: Do you think the president is basing all his decisions on the astrological charts?
A: No, that’s obvious. Just look at this: the president is going off for a summit with Gorbachev, the summit in Moscow. And he’s leaving on Memorial Day weekend. Well, if the president were using an astrologer to time all his events—look, Memorial Day weekend begins one of the suckiest cycles I’ve seen, and it’s going to last all the way into July. Mercury is going retrograde, Venus is going retrograde, and there’s going to be a full moon...If an astrologer was dictating the president’s schedule, and the astrologer told the president to start the summit on Memorial Day weekend, that astrologer must have had a lobotomy.
 
Q: Can you make any predictions for Reagan’s future?
A: We’ve all had problems with Reagan’s chart. We just can’t get the exact time of his birth. Back when he was born, when they chiseled that information on the wall of a cave...they didn’t keep very good records. Certainly not in Tampico, Illinois.

Q: So you can’t say anything about Reagan’s future?
A: Oh, sure. Astrologically, his place in history is assured as a great president, like him or not. He’s always done things at just the right time, when conditions were favorable—as contrasted with Jimmy Carter, who did everything at the worst of all possible cycles. He seemed to have an instinct for doing things at the wrong time…You know, there’s never been a treaty or a contract made under a retrograde Mercury that ever worked. And I remember watching the news after the Camp David summit, with Begin and Carter and Sadat all shaking hands. And Mercury was retrograde! I remember saying this thing will never work, it’s a retrograde-Mercury contract. That was Jimmy Carter for you.”
 
DEEP ROTE
35 years ago
May 8, 1973 | Janet Maslin weighed in on the controversy surrounding 70’s cult porn film Deep Throat, on trial for obscenity charges.
“...Deep Throat...lasts for less than an hour and is astonishingly unerotic as these things go, what with its myriad mystiqueless closeups and a score which, in the words of one rock critic, ‘sounds like they walked into a supermarket with a tape recorder.’ It does have its funny moments, a few of them even intentional, as its storybook heroine with the dislocated clitoris searches for what she coyly refers to as ‘tingles’ (‘I want to hear bells, bombs, dams bursting, something!’) En route to a revoltingly happy ending, the story has her falling in love with a joke-happy doctor who physically befriends her (and who makes the kind of wisecracks that wouldn’t pass for funny on Saturday morning TV), and then nursing a bunch of ‘patients’...‘The results,’ as the official synopsis put it, ’will have you holding onto your crotch with laughter.’ Or whatever. Either way, you’re more likely to be holding onto your mouth, suppressing the occasional yawn.” Read Full Article

5/9/2008 11:16:54 AM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

NOT-SO-FOND FAREWELL
5 years ago
May 02, 2003| Joyce Millman bade adieu to the WB’s Dawson’s Creek.
“An era is about to end as one of TV’s most influential series says goodbye. And no, I’m not talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This Wednesday...on the WB, Dawson’s Creek will have its series finale, after six seasons of tortured love geometry, high-school (and college) angst, smart-ass dialogue, and bad film-school pretensions. In any universe (not just the Buffyverse), Buffy — which ends its run May 20 — is the superior show. But though Buffy may have saved the world (a lot) over the past seven seasons (the first five on the WB, the last two on UPN), it was Dawson who won the battle for the soul of the WB — assuming a network that made its reputation on a cartoon frog and a seemingly endless supply of pretty young actors and actresses has a soul.” Read Full Article

STRAIGHT SHOOTERS
20 years ago
May 06, 1988| Ric Kahn gave a glimpse into the Washington Generals, the losingest team in basketball. 
“Though...it’s not like wrestling, where the outcome is predetermined, the odds are triple-stacked in the Globetrotters’ favor. As [owner/coach ‘Red’ Klotz] Klotz explains it, there are two parts to every Globetrotter-General contest: the game and the show. When it’s showtime — dancing, dribbling, and double dunks — the Generals play the straight part. They know the riffs by heart, after first practicing the routines with the Trotters and then having the bits nightly branded onto their brains...When it’s game time, says Klotz, his guys (and gal) play to W-I-N. ‘They play hard every game.’ Trouble is, with the Trotters getting so many gimme points during showtime, the Generals are always playing come-from-behind. But when the victories dribble in — and the Gens just about have to play a perfect, no-turnovers game to win — it feels as sweet as getting a high-five from heaven.”

BUILDING BETTER BODYGUARDS
30 years ago
May 02, 1978| Michael Matza attended Somerville resident Tony Scotti’s ‘anti-terrorist’ driving school for chauffeurs and bodyguards.
“On the morning we arrive, Scotti is lecturing in the small, wooden, racetrack box office that serves as his classroom...Although the students are eager to get on with the strategic-driving phase of the day’s lesson (bootleggers, J-turns, off-road recoveries), Scotti is intent on emphasizing the value of ‘route planning,’ the practice of constantly altering the path between home and office to avoid becoming predictable...‘They estimate that Aldo Moro was under surveillance in Italy for 35 to 40 days. His driver changed his route daily. But no matter which route he took, he would arrive at church at precisely 7:45 every morning. The same time every day,’ Scotti emphasizes, shaking his head at the simplicity of the error. ‘It proves one thing. You can be religious; just don’t do it on time.’ ” Read Full Article

DRAMA SCHOOL
35 years ago
May 01, 1973| Sid Blumenthal examined a religious argument personified in a Boston classroom.                               

“The most controversial course in the Boston area is offered at Tufts University’s Experimental College. It does not deal with abortion, amnesty, busing, or IQ scores and heredity. The course is entitled ‘Zionism Reconsidered’ and is taught by Marty Blatt, a recent Tufts Graduate.

“...[H]is course, which includes readings from Theodore Herzl, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-Paul Sartre, has been greeted by the traditional Jewish organizations and the Jewish Defense League with intense hostility.

“The JDL termed ‘Zionism Reconsidered’ an ‘anti-Jewish outrage.’ They place Marty Blatt in an anti-Semitic pantheon somewhere between Herman Goering and Albert Speer. ‘Not since Germany in the days of Hitler,’ a JDL statement read, ‘has any university dared to offer a course presenting a one-sided view of any national movement.’

“On March 13, the JDL decided to take action. They gathered their forces, about a dozen members, and barged into the Tufts’ classroom singing Israeli national songs. One of their number announced that the course was concluded, henceforth and forever. The JDLers refused to speak directly with Blatt. ‘We are not here to debate with an anti-Zionist,’ a leaflet that was distributed said, ‘any more than we would discuss with a Nazi whether Jews should be exterminated, and if so, how many.’ ”

 

5/1/2008 11:47:35 AM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

PLAYING FAVORITES
5 years ago
April 25, 2003 | Brent Kendall analyzed how a presidential candidate’s declared “favorite book” can affect his campaign chances.
“The 2000 election demonstrated precisely how candidates' book choices play right into the media's preconceived storylines--for better and for worse. The vice president announced his book selection on ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show,’ Stendhal's The Red and the Black...Unfortunately for Gore, The Red and the Black provided a convenient plotline for his detractors. Stendhal's protagonist Julien Sorel may be one of the great characters of 19th-century literature, but he was also an opportunist whose actions were calculated to advance his career. Reporters seized on Sorel's inauthenticity as an analogy for Gore's. When Gore decided not to pursue the 2004 nomination, National Review extended the analogy even further, writing that his fancy for ‘Stendhal's novel of a career chosen against inclination’ was evidence that he ‘felt that politics was a burden.’

“George W. Bush fared much better, citing Marquis James's The Raven, a 1929 biography of Sam Houston, whose life had hit an alcohol-induced rock bottom after years of success, only to be once again lifted when he moved to Texas and rediscovered his guiding principles. That was Bush's campaign story in a nut-shell...In the end, each book jibed with the media's storyline about each candidate — Bush, the easy-going, prodigal Texan, and Gore, the know-it-all pandering phony.” Read Full Article

BARNICLE’S BLUNDERS
10 years ago
April 24, 1998 | Dan Kennedy pointed out an embarrassing error Mike Barnicle made in a Boston Globe column.
“There he goes again.

“In this past Sunday’s Boston Globe, columnist Mike Barnicle sneers at those who are not familiar with the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough, writing that ‘if you do not know who he is or what he has written during his life, then drop this section and go directly to the comics.’

“Trouble is, Barnicle misspelled McCullough’s name — repeating his feat of a week earlier, when he mangled the names of music legends Bo Diddley and Brownie McGhee...”

IT'S A MAD, MAD WORLD WE LIVE IN
20 years ago
April 22, 1988 | Susan Buchsbaum attended a Baby Miss of America pageant at the Holiday Inn in Randolph, Mass.
“Music plays, lights blaze, and the first parent steps from behind a curtain to display Nicole, a two-month-old infant who is fast asleep. Desperately, the mother tries to rouse the child, shaking her vigorously as the judges look on. The panel will be deciding on the Best Outfit, the Most Photogenic Baby, and the child with the Most Fascinating Eyes. Valiantly the mother continues to jiggle her baby...as the emcee informs the audience that ‘Nicole’s favorite food is formula.’ ...

“...Nicole actually wins the prize for Most Photogenic. Jasmine, a five-month-old wearing a floppy white bow...wins for her outfit and her eyes. When she is also pronounced the overall winner in the Pee Wee category, the music soars...and the puzzled infant...is draped with a banner and crowned...Modeling, says St. John, who directs the Babies of America Modeling Agency, is definitely in the cards.”

SACRIFICIAL LAMBS
25 years ago
April 26, 1983 | Michael Matza got both sides of the debate in a piece dealing with animal experimentation in local biomedical research facilities.

"As many MFA supporters see it, morally dubious animal research has been promoted by a stream of platitudes about curing cancer and saving children. ‘The public and the press has pandered slavishly, almost sycophantically, to anyone who wears a white coat,’ says Annette Pickett of Lincoln, MFA’s (The Mobilization For Animals) coordinator for the Northeast...She is deeply suspicious of the motives and methods of university-affiliated scientists. ‘It’s no great, bursting desire to save human life’ that motivates them...’They’re out for their own egos...,’ she asserts. ‘They’re out to extract the secrets of the universe by literally cutting animals apart. That seems to me the least likely way to learn the mysteries of life.’
...
“Defenders of the primate center in Southboro...mention the disease studies in cats that played a role in the development of the polio vaccine; they also mention the use of dogs in the discovery of insulin 60 years ago...Other life-saving medical breakthroughs include the development of techniques related to organ transplants and coronary bypass surgery, as Dr. S.J. Adelstein, dean for academic programs of the Harvard Medical School, told the Harvard Gazette last month. ‘And this list is just the beginning,’ he said. ‘Artificial hips and knees for the elderly, treatment of children with congenital heart disease..., all of these and other breakthroughs have only been possible through animal studies.’ ”

4/24/2008 12:02:55 PM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

CROSSING OVER
5 years ago
April 18, 2003 | Dan Kennedy discussed what he thought was “perhaps the most astounding media story to come out" of the Iraq War.
“This past Sunday, Jules Crittenden, the Boston Herald reporter embedded with the Army’s Third Infantry Division, described how he ‘went over to the dark side.’ While rolling through Baghdad, Crittenden called out the positions of three Iraqi soldiers aiming rocket-propelled grenades at the vulnerable, ‘lightly armored’ vehicle he was riding in so that an American gunner could kill them. ‘I saw one man’s body splatter as the large caliber bullets ripped it up,’ Crittenden wrote. ‘The man behind him appeared to be rising, and was cut down by repeated bursts.’

“Crittenden then added: ‘...Now that I have assisted in the deaths of three fellow human beings in the war I was sent to cover, I’m sure there are some people who will question my ethics, my objectivity, etc...Screw them, they weren’t there. But they are welcome to join me next time if they care to test their professionalism.’ " Read Full Article

CANDID CAMERA
10 years ago
April 17, 1998 | Ellen Barry wrote about a potentially controversial Children’s Hospital program where patients are sent home with video cameras to report on the causes of their conditions.
“The home movies, when they came in, contained a wealth of visual information—rooms full of plants, which are grade-A mold producers; dusty construction sites outside kids’ windows—the kind of things you’d have to visit to see. There’s also information that might not come out in an old-style house call; footage of a smoke-filled kitchen; of medication overused or wrongly used; of hostility to doctors and isolation from peers...In one shot, an adult hand holding a cigarette reaches across the lens to turn the camera off. From the podium, watching the doctors watch the tapes, is Dr. Michael Rich.

“Rich’s project, the Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment program, or VIA, may change the way doctors treat asthma...[I]t also has the potential to go much further. ‘We used this methodology with a relatively tame subject, but we want to apply it to much more controversial issues,’ Rich says. Video intervention could be used not only to monitor the lives of kids with chronic illnesses such as sickle-cell disease, diabetes, and HIV, but also to achieve ‘complex medical interventions’ in cases that involve substance abuse, teen pregnancy, and violence in the home. It could bring the child’s experience to center stage.”

GAY BASHING
20 years ago
April 15, 1988 | Daniel Pearl reported on the quest to expand Boston University’s anti-discrimination policy to include the phrase “sexual orientation.”
“Boston University Students have staked out the next battleground in their continuing war with the administration over sexual politics: BU’s 119-year-old anti-discrimination policy, which some feel should be amended to include the phrase ‘sexual orientation.’ But BU President John Silber indicated during an address to students last week that the administration is no more receptive to that policy change than it was to putting condom machines in BU’s bathrooms.

“When Jeff Nickel of the BU Lesbian/Gay Alliance asked whether the university would include ‘sexual orientation’ in its anti-discrimination protections, Silber replied, ‘Now suppose someone’s sexual orientation is toward child molestation. What happens then?’ The new language, he continued, would permit ‘all forms of perversion and sex with animals and children and anything else. We’re not going to do that.’ Silber also said he does not believe that homosexuality is a ‘normative way of life’ and would not want incoming students to think the practice is desirable.”

STEER CLEAR
25 years ago
April 19, 1983 | During a party given in his wife’s honor, Alan Lupo managed to alienate most everybody there.
“I am a Bermuda Triangle conversationalist. I start talking, and people begin disappearing. ‘I have to jog,’ one young woman insisted.

“ ‘But its dark and dangerous out there,’ I cautioned.

“ ‘Oh, that’s no problem,’ she said, backing toward the door. ‘Lots of runners out, lots of joggers, no sir, no problem at all, nice to meet you...'

“Moments later, my new conversation partner announced to me in what appeared to be a prepared statement, ‘I must get some wine.’ She fled to a corner, where she began drinking and talking to anyone who was there...I thought I spotted her glancing warily in my direction from time to time.”

Plus: Twenty years ago, reporter Sean Flynn investigated the controversy surrounding an inflammatory student newspaper at Dartmouth College. Read the article in full here.

4/18/2008 10:03:18 AM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

THE WRITING IS ON THE WALL AND IT’S BEEN PENNED IN FLOURESCENT HUES
5 years ago
April 11, 2003 | Camille Dodero looked at how city surfaces were providing "a canvas for public expression" concerning the Iraq War.
“In the cavernous front lobby of Simmons College’s Main College Building, there’s a bathroom-graffiti-style debate unfurling on a long scroll of white paper. But this isn’t your typical girls’-school catfight — it’s a communal deliberation about the war, thrashed out in colored-pencil curlicues, fluorescent hues, and affixed appendages: a casualty list; a pencil-squiggled AMERICAN DEATH DOESN’T COUNT IN THE PERSIAN GULF;...BUSH + DICK = FUCKED crayoned in crimson. One contributor spits at all local dissenters: OUR SOLDIERS ARE OVER THERE SO YOUR YUPPY ASS CAN HAVE THE FREEDOM TO SPEAK OUT. THE GOAL IS TO GIVE THE IRAQIS THAT SAME RIGHT. IF YOU DON’T LIKE THE US, GET THE FUCK OUT. To which another has politely responded, YOUR IGNORANCE SHOWS THAT YOU ONLY GET INFORMATION FROM THE MEDIA. On the portion of the paper that’s unrolled onto the floor, there’s the slogan DYKES FOR PEACE…OUR BUSHES ARE SMARTER! accompanied by a graphic sketch. An arrow points back, CAN YOU PLEASE NOT BRING YOUR SEXUALITY INTO EVERY ISSUE?” Read Full Article

 

WE’RE PRETTY SURE THIS ISN’T SATIRE...
10 years ago
April 10, 1998 | Tom Scocca talked to The Krone Company of Illinois, who had just unveiled a new product — a fountain pen containing the “genetic essence” of Abraham Lincoln.
“Mercifully, Krone president Robert Kronenberger explains that the essence in question comes not from, say, the gory upholstery at Ford’s Theater, but from a sample of the 16th president’s hair — obtained, Kronenberger says, from a Connecticut archive holding ‘the largest hair collection in the world.’ Lincoln’s DNA, he continues, has been extracted from the sample and copied through polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification. ‘It is an exact copy of his DNA in every pen,’ Kronenberger says.
...
“Being submicroscopic, the DNA isn’t much to look at...Kronenberger says it’s been mixed in with tiny glass beads, so that the pen owner can at least see something glimmering in the depths of the amethyst. For that tenuous glimpse of history, Krone is charging $1650..., which gets you—along with one of the 1008 Lincoln pens being made—...and a leather-bound, 50-page book that explains how the pen was made and tells ‘unknown facts about Lincoln and his use of the pen,’ Kronenberger says. ‘Not this pen,’ he adds, ‘but the pen generically speaking.’ ”

 

EARTHQUAKE ETIQUETTE
20 years ago
April 8, 1988 Daniel Pearl gave out advice to readers should Boston ever be hit by an earthquake.
“Don’t talk about the earthquake while it is in progress. The topic will be discussed ad nauseum for the next two days, rest assured. Besides, it’s tough to say something quotable during a quake. The best lines (‘It’s the end — Krakatoa, Samoa, Vesuvias, Formosa, San Francisco — this is death’) have been taken, and the worst (‘Keverian must have slipped on the State House stairs’) will become stale quickly...All in all, it’s better to talk about something else. Point to your newspaper and say, ‘Look, there was another apartment fire last night.’ ”

 

IN TED WE TRUST
25 years ago
April 12, 1983 | Michael Gee profiled Red Sox great Ted Williams and his enduring legend.
“To a remarkable extent, Ted Williams has spent his life doing things he wanted to do, when and how he wanted. In the weak, that kind of blessing produces self-indulgence long before it produces achievement. Even in the strongest personality, pure will has a dark side, a side Williams indulged time and again. But will produces light as well, sometimes in surprising quantities and places. The Jimmy Fund exists and prospers today largely because of the efforts of Ted Williams. He didn’t just raise money, either — he sat and talked with kids who were dying, time after time. He did it, and he didn’t want anyone to know, and damned few people knew. Those were his terms, and he got them. This unqualified good sprang from the same will that produced tantrums, curses, and occasional contempt for the public...Williams gave vent to his darkest impulses as forthrightly as he did his brighter ones. And that, in the end, is why people were attracted to the show Ted Williams put on day after day for two decades as a ballplayer. The spectacle of someone forcing his own terms on the world around him is rarer by far than the sight of a home run.”

4/10/2008 12:39:45 PM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

MASSAGE HERESY
10 years ago
April 3, 1998 | Sarah McNaught looked into why a local massage student was expelled from the Muscular Therapy Institute upon divulging that she was a professional dominatrix.
“Sheila, however, says there is nothing dangerous about her work, which involves various forms of erotic pain or domination. And she is adamant that she does not have sex with her clients.

“ ‘The idea is for me to establish my dominance over them in different ways,’ she explains. ‘Sometimes, for instance, putting a collar on them is enough to give them the sense of submission they seek.’ Whether the scenario involves forced cross-dressing or foot worship, she says, her profession relies on acting out other people’s fantasies. ‘Some people enjoy humiliation and being under my control as a way to escape their everyday lives for an hour,’ she says.

“But from [MTI’s executive director Mary Ann] DiRoberts’s point of view, what Sheila does is not so harmless. DiRoberts believes that potential clients’ opinion of massage therapy will suffer if the public finds out that MTI counts sex workers among its students. The consequence, she says, will be a decrease in clientele for the profession as a whole.”
 
SMACK ATTACK
20 years ago
April 1, 1988 | Ric Kahn reported on Gloucester’s serious heroin problem, finding that one out of 125 Gloucester residents was a junkie.
“Gloucester—Sir Smack blew in from Boston back in ’68...

“He was electric, charming the pants off both the guys and girlies. They’d lie and steal just to spend some time with him, their demigod, for he could stifle their pain. The outnumbered cops tried to bust up the all-night party, kick him out of their seafaring city. But he was hard to keep down. In waterfront barrooms, down on the boulevard near the famous bronze Man at the Wheel, in the bathrooms and basements of turn-of-the-century-double-deckers — he was being introduced all over town. Buddy to buddy, cousin to cousin, husband and wife, brother to sister, generation to generation, his influence spread from Gloucester and its industrial-strength family ties. The former big-city stranger became a downright Gloucester guy, a regular Jones.” Read Full Article

MEAN STREET
25 years ago
April 5, 1983 | William Bennett talked to the New England Athletics Congress chairman for “race walking” Steve Vaitones about his peculiar sport and those who heckle him for it.
“Even more discouraging than automobiles are their drivers — at least for a race walker. Race walkers do look odd, and drivers don’t let them forget it. Vaitones, who is currently spending three hours a day practicing his arm-swinging, straight-legged lope, has plenty of opportunity to collect insults. One of the standard routines goes like this; driver puts beer can in right hand, cranks down window with left. ‘Whatsa matta — your jockstrap too tight?’ Swigs. Guns accelerator.

“Occasionally, though, Vaitones overhears an onlooker reprimand a heckler: ‘Hey that’s hard work. I read about it in an airline magazine.’ “

COMING TO LIGHT
30 years ago
April 4, 1978 | Howard Litwak sifted through Franz Kafka’s Letters To Friends, Family, And Editors.
“Had Franz Kafka’s wishes been carried out, this volume of his letters would never have been published. Kafka asked Max Brod, his longtime friend...to burn his correspondence...after his death. Fortunately for us, Brod chose to ignore those instructions...

“The letters...reveal other aspects of his personality: his forthright and perceptive criticism of the works-in-progress of his friends,... his dissatisfaction with his own writing (to Brod: ‘I am not enclosing the novels (referring to The Trial and Amerika.) Why stir up the old struggles? Only because I haven’t burned them yet?’), his self-loathing (to Klopstock: ‘Must you always be reproving me? Don’t I do that enough myself?’ and later ‘You must simply keep in mind that you are writing to a wretched little person possessed by all sorts of evil spirits.’) Yet he never lost the biting wit also evident in his works. Writing to Brod of trying to housebreak a cat:
 
“How hard it is to arrive at an understanding with an animal on this question. There seem to be only misunderstandings, for the cat knows, through blows and other explanation, that there is something undesirable about taking care of her needs of nature, and that the place for it has to be carefully chosen. So what does she do? Well, for example she chooses a spot that is dark, that will in addition show me her affection...But from the human side this spot happens to be inside my bedroom slipper.”

4/4/2008 10:40:14 AM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

PRESS UNDER FIRE

5 years ago
March 28, 2003 | Dan Kennedy talked to UVA professor Larry Sabato about the drawbacks of embedded reporting during the Iraq War.

" 'I suppose the embedding is useful overall, and occasionally...it has resulted in on-the-spot coverage of hard news,’ says...Sabato...‘But embedding has also resulted in a loss of the big picture during a good bit of the coverage, with loads of soft, human-interest coverage that actually tells the viewers nothing of importance. Seeing a TV reporter riding in the back of a dust-covered jeep with his gas mask on makes for great video. But when he tells us, as one did, ‘We’re on the move, but I can’t say where we are or where we’re heading or what we’re going to do when we get there,’ what’s the point? To prove there are soldiers on the ground moving toward Baghdad? I think we knew that.’ ” Read Full Article

 

WRESTLING PREJUDICE

10 years ago
March 27, 1998 | Dan Tobin analyzed the bad guys of pro wrestling, concluding the sport to be “a window onto the Zeitgeist.”
“...wrestling villainy is an excellent indicator of what makes average Americans nervous. During the Cold War, Russians were the worst bad guys, and a tag team called the Bolsheviks would sing the National Hymn of the Soviet Union before matches. The Iron Sheik was similarly hated for his Iranian patriotism. Then the Berlin Wall came down and the Iron Sheik turned 50. So the WWF sought new bad guys. Its search for a villain has produced the following:

 

Accountants: Out of the depths of the 1991 recession crawled Irwin R. Schyster (a/k/a IRS), who announced before his matches how many months were left until taxes were due. He lasted well into the Republican revolution.

 

Fat people/the Japanese: In the early '90s, Yokozuna weighed in at 589 pounds and defeated Hulk Hogan by distracting him with Eastern fireworks. He was managed by Mr. Fuji, who spoke broken English and threw salt in the eyes of opponents.

 

Gays: In the past few years, Goldust's look has evolved from two-bit drag to a more sophisticated S&M getup. But the message is still the same: Smear the queer...

 

Dentists: Dr. Isaac Yankem embodied everyone's fear of drills, Novocain, and gingivitis. Or something like that.

 

Canadians: The Mountie...was a notorious cheater. And Calgary native Bret "the Hitman" Hart taunted Americans for being bad hockey players. Ouch, Bret. Hit us where it hurts.” Read Full Article

 

PURSUE THE GURU

20 years ago
March 25, 1988 | Kathy McAfee reported on the Boston-based followers of 15-year old Guru Maharaj-ji.

“The Divine Light Mission of 15-year-old Guru Maharaj-ji may be the fastest growing religion in the west...

 

“In Boston, there are more than 400 initiates with local headquarters in a sky-blue mansion off Route Two in Concord. The headquarters is actually an ashram, a sort of co-ed monastery...

“The Concord ashram is filled with altars, mass-produced Indian artifacts and photographs of Guru Maharaju-ji.

“Ashram activities are coordinated by a general secretary, who is a man, and the cooking is done entirely by the ‘house’s mother’ and her female assistant. This job, I was told, can be held by a male only in an emergency. ‘As G’rooma Rajee says, ‘How can a mother be a man’? ‘

“Every resident is supposed to be completely celibate. ‘You see, the ashram works just like a family, and there have to be incest taboos. If there are all these other trips going on, all these little intrigues, it’s not going to hold together.’ "

THE BIGGER, THE BETTER
25 years ago
March 29, 1983 | Joyce Millman reviewed Bette Midler’s gaudy sold-out performances in Boston.

“Bette Midler flaunts her bazooms the way Barbara Streisand flaunts her schnoz. For both entertainers, these fruits of nature’s generosity are a stamp of authenticity—physical assurances that, yes, these grand stars are as humanly imperfect as we schleps across the footlights. A week ago, during her five sold-out performances of ‘De Tour’ at the Opera House, Midler was as adorable blowzy as she’d been when she first jiggled her way to fame...nearly bouncing her Jane Russell-sized breasts out of her trashy-but-flashy push-‘em-up brassiere (‘Yes they are fabulous aren’t they?’) Near the end of the first act, Midler and her backing trio, the Harlettes, performed a sublimely vulgar tune called ‘Great Big Knockers’ while holding balloon mammaries in front of their chests; Midler, of course, toted pink ones so huge that they bowled her over, one sailing into the wings while she used the other for a slippery prop in a deliciously unladylike fan dance.”

3/27/2008 11:17:45 AM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

THE ICK FACTOR
5 years ago
March 21, 2003| While listening to R. Kelly’s new album, Chocolate Factory, critic Jon Caramanica couldn’t get the singer’s recent transgression out of his mind.
“On ‘Ignition Remix,’ for example, there’s some awkward business about spewing ‘venom’ into a lady’s ‘trunk.’ And on ‘You Made Me Love You,’...he leers, ‘You must be one of them top models/Body curved like a pop bottle/Got me sweating like a boxer, baby.’ Kelly has always had a gift for injecting the sacred with the profane, and his predilection for young women has been rumored for years. But his arrest makes listening to a track like the operatic ‘Showdown,’ the latest installment of his mano-a-mano song cycle with Ronald Isley, uncomfortable. The saddest part is that nobody else in contemporary pop has his talent when it comes to recording smooth, sensual slowdances and steamy R&B workouts. Chocolate Factory isn’t a bad album, it’s just a difficult one to listen to.” Read full article

ASSHOLE ALERT
18 years ago
March 24, 1989| Mark Jurkowitz gave a picture of Roger Clemens before he’s accused of anything worse than egocentrism and stiffing little kids.
“About an hour after the Texas Rangers beat the Red Sox...in an exhibition game...young autograph hounds are waiting anxiously near the clubhouse. The big news is that Roger Clemens — he of the Cy Young Awards...—has promised he will sign their baseballs on his way out of the ballpark.

“As Clemens’s car comes into view, the youngsters stream into its path...The problem is that Clemens doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Nope; in fact, he’s cruising right by the pack...like a fullback blasting through a narrow opening in the offensive line...[I]t’s obvious that Clemens has as much intention of stopping as he has of grooving a fastball to Jose Canseco in the bottom of the ninth of a 1-1 game.
...
“Roger Clemens. If there’s one ballplayer who seems to epitomize...what many people perceive as the egocentric and selfish new breed of ballplayer, it is the Rocket in ’89 — a somber, hulking presence around the clubhouse, a guy who would stiff a group of kids who have waited for him after the ballgame, and in this exhibition season, a ballplayer who has enveloped himself in the cone of silence by refusing to talk to the press.

“And to Clemens’s way of thinking, the media are the culprits.”

POETRY IN MOTION
25 years ago
March 22, 1983| Robert Polito rhapsodized on the merits of poet Elizabeth Bishop’s body of work.
“Robert Lowell told an interviewer that ‘he enjoyed her poems more than anybody else’s.’ John Ashbery termed her ‘the writer’s writer’s writer.’ To James Merrill she was ‘our greatest national treasure’...

“The Complete Poems 1927-1979...gathers in one volume the life work of Elizabeth Bishop, the poet most admired and celebrated by our other most admired and celebrated poets. ...

“That Bishop is less well known than some of her admirers is a paradox that floats on a short string above the qualities that make her work so distinctive. Her poems resist even the most supple efforts to categorize them. Despite its slenderness — The Complete Poems 1927-1979 comprises 115 original performances — the identifying mark of this book is its variety...Bishop’s writings ‘dramatize the mind in action rather than in repose,’ as she approvingly described the procedures of some 17th-century sermons. And like her ‘Gentleman of Shalott’ she ‘loves/that sense of constant re-adjustment.’ As a result, Bishop has been difficult to pin down in anthologies. Instead of a handful of agreed-upon, representative, important pieces, what we discover here is almost unequaled range and diversity. In the writing of no other American poet...is there greater amplitude of feeling, tone and attitude, and less repetition.”

SEE NO EVIL
35 years ago
March 20, 1973| Staying for some time overseas in Vienna, Austria, writer Sylvia Rothchild said that the city “suffers from amnesia.”
“Strange to come from a post-affluent society to a pre-affluent one, from post-Freud to pre-Freud as well as pre-youth culture, counter culture, women’s liberation, all the rebellions of the sixties and seventies! Especially bizarre since I always felt that the counter culture...was a response to what went on in Austria and Germany. To be sick of the Vietnam war was not only to be horrified at killing innocent people, but also to be terrified that we were not really different from Nazis. Being at the scene of the old crimes, however only added to the confusion. Vienna suffers from amnesia. It’s a city full of statues and memorials, obsessed with history as architecture and operetta, opposed to dwelling on any ‘unpleasantness.’ No demonstrations, no strikes, no controversies in the newspapers...”

3/20/2008 10:56:26 AM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

HOLY PURPOSE
5 years ago
March 14, 2003 | Michael Bronski talked to a peace activist with the idea of sending the Pope to Iraq in order to stop the impending war.
“Renowned peace and anti-nuke activist Helen Caldicott thinks she has a way to stop the all-but-inevitable war with Iraq: convince Pope John Paul II to join the human shields in Baghdad. Caldicott, who became well known during the 1980s for her anti-nuke activism, is urging people around the world to contact the pope and ask him to travel to Iraq...

“Caldicott argues that ‘[t]he Pope’s physical presence in Iraq will act as the ultimate human shield, during which time leaders of the world nations can commit themselves to identifying and implementing a peaceful solution to this war that the world’s majority clearly does not support.’ The Web site of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute (www.nuclearpolicy.org) posts a letter from Caldicott as well as a sample letter to send to Vatican City that argues her case in the most serious terms — ‘your physical presence in Baghdad will prevent the impending slaughter of hundreds of thousands of human beings’...” Read Full Article

THE TARANTINO TOUCH
10 years ago
March 13, 1998 | Rachel O’Malley imagined what certain classic productions would be like in Quentin Tarantino’s hands.

“1. Oklahoma!
Wait Until Dark at the Wilbur was just the beginning for Tarantino’s stage career. O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A spells D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R when Quentin plays Curly in this once-hokey musical. Curly is sick of Laurie’s wiles, and by the time they reach the square dance, the shiny little surrey with the fringe on top is wrecked. Curly accidentally blows Laurie’s head off with his .45 when they hit a bump in the dirt road. All he wanted was a little respect.

...
5. Hamlet
This Hamlet is much shorter than Kenneth Branagh’s recent film. Hamlet has Claudius, Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern bound and gagged 10 minutes into the play. An hour later, they’ve been forced to listen to Polonius repeat his ‘To thine own self be true’ speech about six times, and Rosencrantz is pleading to keep his other ear.”

COLD COMFORTS
20 years ago
March 11, 1988 | Ric Kahn reported on the passing of local celebrity-cum-hermit Bill Brit.
“There’ll be no more newsroom phone calls from Bill Britt. God has called the 52-year-old hermit of Chestnut Hill home from the simple wigwam that, standing tall on a small patch of public land near the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, served as one man’s castle for almost 20 years. Authorities say Britt froze to death in the Massachusetts winter.

“For what seemed like half his breathing hours, Bill Britt waged an unyielding battle against bureaucratic bullies who viewed his attempts to be left out in the cold, amid the raindrops and raccoons, as merely trespassing. Like other offbeat souls who choose to live their lives off society’s beaten path, Britt’s campaign to camp out with Mother Nature — frugally financed by the coins collected from turning in discarded bottles and cans — exposed the overbearing nature of the state, which resorted to using the courts,... a cop masquerading as a reporter, and a bulldozer to try and toss out one solitary man, Billy Britt.”

STEVEN TYLER SOCIETY
25 years ago
March 15, 1983 | Surveying the crowd at an Aerosmith show at the Cape Cod Coliseum, Doug Simmons recalled the old days when he was a freak for the band.
“...the group’s bargain-basement Stones show delighted guys like me and my friends. We aped the band’s delinquent image, albeit with less mascara, and marveled at Joe Perry’s kerchunkachunka guitar and Steven Tyler’s gypsy sleaze and ripped-larynx singing. Looking back I have no regrets, but looking across Cape Cod Coliseum’s iceless hockey rink, my nostalgia soured. Were my friends and I this surly? Probably....There was only one difference between the Cape crowd and my crew a decade ago: as a companion said of the 6500-strong mob, ‘If we nuked Iran tomorrow there aren’t three people in this place who would care.’ We would have cared, but only because when it came to war we had Vietnam to wise us up.” Read Full Article

3/13/2008 10:51:12 AM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

THE ROMNEY DIET
5 years ago
March 7, 2003 | Kristen Lombardi delved into Governor Romney’s fiscal budget to see who would be hurt most by his balancing act.
“Even before advocates can sort through Romney’s plan and decipher where, exactly, human-services spending has been cut, they’ve noted that, for all the talk of his ‘commitment’ to core services, the governor still manages to balance his FY ’04 budget on the backs of the state’s neediest citizens. For one thing, the governor’s proposal, known as ‘House 1,’ continues what advocates call the ‘reprehensible’ assault on small state agencies providing social services. It hammers away at the Disabled Persons Protection Commission, which investigates abuse in group homes...It slashes away $800,000 from vocational and home-care programs for residents grappling with brain injuries and other chronic disabilities...As MHLAC senior attorney Susan Fendell points out, ‘This is a terribly vulnerable population with great need for someone to go to bat for them and enforce their legal rights to mental-health care.’ ” Read Full Article

END OF AN ERA
10 years ago
March 6, 1998 | Jason Gay discussed the pacification of Cambridge, once Boston’s “Moscow-on-the-Charles.”
“...Cambridge’s progressive fireworks — it’s ‘People’s Republic’ rebelliousness — seem to be going the way of all those mom-and-pop stores on Mass Ave. The new Cambridge is rich and getting richer, less diverse, and (egad) more conservative. Likewise, the new Cantabrigian isn’t the activist type, and is less likely to pay attention to street-level city politics. Sure, people still care about issues like good schools, safe streets, and clean water, but when it comes to political life, Cambridge today has more in common with sleepier, more suburban-style cities like Brookline or Newton than with the Cambridge of old. There are different faces, different attitudes, and shifting priorities.” Read Full Article

FACING RACE
20 years ago
March 4, 1988 | Scott Lehigh observed how presidential candidate Jesse Jackson handled the race issue during a campaign stopover in Hazard, Kentucky.
“There is, of course, the asterisk that clings to Jackson like a shadow, an asterisk that says, in barely discernible subtext beneath the polite print, ‘Of course, though this man is one of the leaders in the polls right now, he can’t win because he is black.’ When a TV reporter asks him if he can win, Jackson is brusque. ‘Let’s concentrate on real substance, which is not race, but economic violence,’ he says. And in yet another Democratic debate in Williamstown, Virginia, he gets the biggest hand of the day with his dignified objection to the question of whether the other candidates let him off easy because he is black. But Jackson is too cagey a politician not to realize this is an issue he must address, and in Hazard he makes a not so subtle point: ‘When GE clears out, when they take away your job, when they take away your farm, they turn the lights out.’ A dramatic pause. ‘And all of us look just alike in the dark.’ ” Read Full Article

SHAME ON THE TRAIN 
25  years ago
March 8, 1983 | The Phoenix reported on a local pro-choice organization that battled the MBTA for the right to advertise on subway trains.
“Hemorrhoids, maybe. Dentures, no problem. But when ad requests for the MBTA trains and buses get ‘patently offensive,’ to quote T spokesman Paul DiNatale, they get rejected...

“The proposed advertising campaign, similar to the one run recently in Philadelphia, points out that, though women from every walk of life have had abortions, the right to abortion could be in jeopardy. According to Marjorie Heins, staff counsel for CLUM, the MBTA management was unhappy with the proposed ads because they didn’t want any advertising featuring the word ‘abortion.’...CLUM pointedly reminded T officials that the two had covered this ground in 1974, when the T refused an advertisement for Preterm, a clinic offering vasectomies, gynecological services, birth-control counseling, and abortions. Preterm promptly went to court...After Preterm won a preliminary injunction, the T backed down and posted the ads. When CLUM recalled that precedent, T officials reconsidered and accepted the latest abortion ads.”

 

3/7/2008 5:06:08 PM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

"Mangum's Opus: Neutral Milk Hotel's epic Aeroplane" by Carly Carioli

A decade ago, Carly Carioli interviewed Neutral Milk Hotel's frontman Jeff Mangum about the band's then-just-released, larger-than-life second album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The piece captures the sorrow, spiritualism, and lyricism of the man and the album, and exactly predicts what everyone would be saying 10 years later. Revisit the piece here.

3/7/2008 1:55:28 PM by Nina MacLaughlin | Comments [0] |  

MAD SCIENCE
10 years ago
February 27, 1998 | Sarah McNaught discovered that Boston University’s medical school was still offering live-animal labs for would-be doctors.
“AT BOSTON UNIVERSITY, spring is the time for first-year medical students to put their textbook learning to the test. Each week, students break up into groups of three and attend three-hour labs in which a professor straps a rabbit to a table, anesthetizes it, cuts it open, and shows the students how various medicinal injections affect the animal’s heart rate and blood pressure. When the lab is over, the animals are killed.

“This type of lab has been offered at BU since 1970...What the students are supposed to walk away with is a clearer perception of the way a human’s organs might function under the influence of medications like dopamine and epinephrine. ‘It’s all for the sake of science,’ says Dr. Benjamin Kaminer, chairman of the medical school’s physiology department.” Read the Full Article

SMALL MINDS
20 years ago
February 26, 1988 | Ric Kahn relayed what one dumbass voter in Kentucky had to say about Michael Dukakis’s chances in the presidential election.
“As the high-riding Michael Dukakis looks southward, seeking, as all pols do, to employ the wisdom of that noted political consultant Phineas Taylor (‘There’s a sucker born every minute’) Barnum, one Southerner suggests that the Duke would be better off trading his presidential bid for the top for a stab at life under the Big Top.

“Here’s how one Kentuckian from Louisville sized up the Dukester when asked by larger-than-life New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin, ‘Do you know Dukakis?’

“ ‘I know he’s a little bitty guy, no way anybody that small goin’ get anybody votin’ for him for President. He ought to run for president of the circus, for that’s where he got to go to find somebody short enough to be vice-president.’ ”

LOST IN THE SUPERMARKET
30 years ago
February 28, 1978| For the Phoenix’s “Sightings” column, Jack Bresnahan picked on a couple of folks he spied at Star Market.                                                                                                                                                          “They were a couple up from the ranks. She had won the lottery perhaps, or was the sole heir to some distant mogul. She wallowed in furs, was a beady-eyed, plump, erect mink. Wealth had ruined her husband. Once he’d been Al who lugged tools, yelled orders, and made things...
 
“...At the edge of Fresh Vegetables she tethered him with a look and went off to squeeze tomatoes. There, when satisfied, she summoned him by name and beckon. ‘Al-bert.’

“He leaned into his load, head down, and at an intersection crashed with a younger man’s cart. Groceries trembled, some fell out. As they repacked, both men shrugged grins which claimed fault.

“From over by the scales the wife pinned blame...The words were flung, but they were really only habit-words, automatic, hollow as winter squashes...

“For a minute, looking at the younger man, Albert’s fleshy face was keen. He was Al for a minute, maker of things. Earner. He almost spoke...But the fury snuck back down inside his eyes and left his face simple...Then...There was nothing left in his face at all. ‘Come here, Albert.’

“He bent forward and pushed, his face low over the pile of Life cereal and chicken breasts and Pepperidge Farm cookies. To these things he softly said, ‘Shit.’ ”

STONED STUPID
35 years ago
February 27, 1973| Andrew Kopkind deliberated on the drug culture, or lack thereof.
“The trouble with the drug culture, according to the wise and weird Dr. Humphrey Osmond, is that it is all drugs and no culture. Fantasies of permanently High Society with turned-on politics and cosmic consciousness have lately been dispelled. The stoned segment of the populace...seem no more able to cope with its violence, alienation, and boredom than can the straights in charge...Acid rock, psychedelic art, light shows and doper movies are consigned to narrow moments of nostalgia. The seething creativity of the drug era produced as its masterpiece nothing greater than the musical ‘Hair,’ which now must stand with the Mona Lisa and ‘Don Giovanni’ as the representative work of art of an age of Western civilization. It’s true that the national ‘drug experience’ of the late Sixties did invade mass culture: but in ways that few of the old heads of that era would have predicted, or appreciated.”

 

2/28/2008 11:31:43 AM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

CONFESSIONS OF A SMUGGLER
20 years ago
February 5, 1988 | Nancy Roosa wrote of her experience as a smuggler in Asia.
“The offers were almost too good to pass up. For simply carrying items from Hong Kong into Thailand or Taiwan, as we did, handwritten signs promised US $50 to $100. Even more common are ‘milk runs,’ where a group of milk-fed innocents are led by a smuggler on a five-to-six-day trip through Customs of three countries: South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, carrying items that are limited, prohibited, or expensive in each country. In return, they receive free flights between the countries, rooms in good hotels, all meals, time off for sightseeing, pocket money, and a cash payment.”

 

THE BEST OF THE REST
25 years ago
February 8, 1983 | Phoenix columnist Alan Lupo injected new life into the practice of all-star selection.
“The nonjocks, or the asportual, need not feel left out. All-star teams should not be limited to muscular people who sweat and chew abscess-producing tobacco… Why not the following?
 
“The 10 Best US Presidents, five southpaws and five righties. A Secretaries of the Agriculture Hall of Fame roster. The Five Top Synagogue Custodians in the City of Kiev, 1850-1880. America’s Most Humorous Funeral-Home Ushers...The Five Lowest Academic Achievers in Portia Law History. A Short But Outstanding List of Revere Politicians Who Never Took a Dime.
 
“All-star selections must be open to all Americans. We’re talking access here, open covenants openly arrived at, community participation. So go ahead. Make up a list. For that matter, make up a category. Make up anything you want, and fill in the slots. Your rationale is no better or worse than the traditional reasoning used by the long-time practitioners of this craft.” Read Full Article

 

ANIMATION CASTRATION
30 years ago
February 7, 1978 | Brendan Murphy described how Boston Globe cartoonist Paul Szep had incurred the wrath of hard-nosed City Councilor Dapper O’Neil.
“It was two weeks before last November’s elections and Paul Szep, the Globe’s editorial cartoonist, was taking pot shots at O’Neil, who with the rest of the council was up for re-election. He had rendered O’Neil as a cross-eyed clown with holes in his elongated shoes,...wearing a button reading, ‘Keep Dapper — vote NO on Galvin plan’ (designed to make the council more representative). Below was the caption, ‘I have done nothing in particular, but I have done it very well.’
 
“This was on October 19. Eight days later Szep portrayed councilors O’Neil, Hicks, Langone, and Kerrigan as four clowns tumbling out of a tiny, dilapidated circus jalopy with ‘City Council’ license plates; the caption this time was ‘Four reasons to vote ‘yes’ on the Galvin Plan.’ So Dapper was fuming. But Paul Szep wasn’t nervous. ‘O’Neil threatened me. He’s sort of a caricature of what we think a city councilor to be . . . . But I’m not worried about a guy of the age and condition of Dapper O’Neil. I’ve spent too long, between boxing and hockey: I can take care of a guy like that.’ ”

 

PURSE SNATCHERS
35 years ago
February 6, 1973 | Susan Philips profiled Common Sense, a Cambridge-based tax service that advised people who wished to stop paying for the Vietnam War. “Having gone through a series of both ‘straight’ and war resistance tax training sessions, volunteers at Common Sense are aware of...the complicated details of filing returns. The novice workers cheerfully refer people to one of the experts for difficult calculations. ‘Actually the training of consultants at other tax services is no more extensive than at Common Sense,’ said one volunteer. ‘We’re just as qualified.’
 
“Common Sense is a project of the Roxbury War Tax Scholarship Fund. The Fund has an account in the Unity Bank of Roxbury where resisters can keep their tax money in escrow. If and when a personal bank account is seized for back taxes, the register can make it up by withdrawing the same sum from the Unity Bank. Interest on the fund’s account is directed to socially productive functions. In April and October of each year, members of RWTSF decide collectively where to award the monies. Last October $400 each was given to the Vietnam Resource Center in Cambridge and to the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) Gainsville Defense Fund. RWTSF has a bail fund which includes about one-fourth of their total amount in the Unity Bank. Some members are in contact with prison groups to find individuals who need bail money. This money is also available for tax resisters.”

 

 

2/7/2008 12:52:54 PM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

TOUGH LOVE
5 years ago
January 31, 2003 | Michael Bronski remembered the tough-as-nails, gay journalist Sarah Pettit.
“I DON’T KNOW that I’d say I enjoyed working with Sarah Pettit. One of my first dealings with her was in 1993, when she was the arts editor for Out magazine. She called me on a Monday to ask for revisions on a piece I’d written. She needed the rewrite by Wednesday. I told her that I’d do my best but that my lover, Walta, was having brain surgery on Tuesday. A shunt was being placed in his cranium to drain fluid that was building up because of an AIDS-related infection...When I was finished, she paused and said, ‘Well, that excuse might work in Boston, but it won’t fly here in New York.’

“I love telling this story — which always shocks people — because it epitomizes Sarah’s complexity. While some might have found her remark insensitive, I took it as she intended: a form of humor that people — mostly gay men — use in an attempt to make the horror of AIDS emotionally manageable.” read full article

INDOCTRINATION STATION
10 years ago
January 30, 1998 | Lucky duck Mark Bazer scored a free ticket to the movie, Orientation, playing at the Church of Scientology.
“After a complete tour and a brief conversation with an L. Ron expert..., the Guy [film’s narrator] laid it on the line. ‘You stand at the threshold of your next trillion years. You can either live them in shivering darkness or in the light. The choi