Foreign Films

It's time to start thinking about what films to "discuss" at this season's Hockomock Film Festival Movie Club. Over the year's we've highlighted a number of great foreign films because we try to have about a quarter of our films from outside the English speaking world. I know a lot of folks don't like to read the subtitles on a film, but it's worth a stretch since so many excellent films are made outside the US and UK.
Here's a list of my favorites from Asia and the Middle East which runs to dramas since I'm humor challenged and prefer dark films. Actually I prefer films where things blow up preferably with cowboys, but I'm trying to be serious. Films from Europe tomorrow.

China
To Live-Zhang Yimou's reflection on forty years of 20th century Chinese history. An epic film told from one family's point of view. This is my favorite film of all time both for its story and the extraordinary film-making. A film that repays repeated viewing because the more you look the more you see.

Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-Two films that build on the traditional Chinese genre of sword and wire-work films to create real art. Both are extraordinarily beautiful. In Hero, Zhang Yimou shoots each segment of the film in a different color scheme and makes great use of special effects. The story and acting in CTHD makes you care about the characters.

Japan
I'm partial to the films of Akira Kurosawa. Rashomon is a masterpiece of world cinema with its single story told from multiple points of view. The Seven Samurai is a classic action film that became a classic cowboy movie when it was remade as The Magnificent Seven. Ran, Kurosawa's homage to Shakespeare's King Lear, is a brilliant film about how things fall apart.

India
Sorry to say, I haven't really gotten into the serious cinema of India. My favorite Bollywood film is Lagaan, a movie about an Indian village that uses cricket to beat the Brits out of a tax increase. They sing, they dance, they use every cliche of sports and war films, and its fun.  My Name is Khan, while not quite in the same class as the other films here, is an wonderful, very human film about an autistic man's triumphs-actually two or three movies, in India, in America, and in Love. Indian films tend to run beyond the two hour time frame favored by film club members, but I should spend some time with both the classic films of Satyajit Ray and modern serious films.

Iran
The Color of Paradise is the story of a blind boy who is not loved by his father. The film is amazing in that you see what it is to be blind. No coincidence that the little boy is named Mohammed and that the viewer is placed in the role of the omniscient observer. My other all-time favorite film. This one will blow you away and stay with you a long, long time.

Iraq
Turtles Can Fly. An antiwar film that isn't anti-American. Refugee children making a life amid the ruins.

To Facebook or Not to Facebook and the First Bachman Rant

I have a Facebook page. Unlike my students I haven't opened it for over a year. My family consists of cousins who are scattered from Alabama to Utah so Facebook looked like a good way to communicate. Then there were the long lost former students. Surprisingly, there were students in my past who still wanted to stay in touch. As a late arriver to social networking things quickly got overwhelming, however. The etiquette of friending, what happens when you write on a wall, what are gifts like purple flowers or cuddly koalas, and too many news reports on what Facebook was doing with all my data quickly drove me away.

Linked In was an alternative, but it's focus on building business contacts isn't the social network I need. Unfortunately, I had no choice but to join since I let some Linked In people use me as a reference. At least there aren't any walls.

Now Google is launching a new social networking system called Google+. It's in testing mode right now and available by invitation only (you can ask to be invited) so someone like me can get in on the ground floor before the elevator goes up (cliches are available on the second floor). One obvious advantage is the concept of circles where you can create smaller groups to hear specific things-the Pope in one circle and Whitey Bulger in another-should reduce the possibility of Weiner moments where I'd send inappropriate pictures of Maggie bullying other dogs to the cousins and the MSPCA. Google+ also has a teleconferencing feature where up to ten people can see each other at one time or so the ad says. Preliminary reports emphasize the privacy of the system, but I don't see Google not using data for commercial purposes. Type the word dog in a Google search and you're likely to discover where you can buy doggie toys in South Easton. Still Google+ does seem like something that might work for this geezer. I'll ask for an invitation and get back to you.

Note to Republicans. There's nothing wrong with expanding the brand, but you have to do it the right way. First, there was Budweiser and then there was Bud Lite; first there was Sam Adams and then there was Sam Lite. First there was Sarah Palin and then there was Michelle Bachman. Clearly the light version of Sarah Palin should be called Sarah Lite. When you're marketing to folks who can't meet the heavy intellectual standards of Mama Grizzly, you shouldn't confuse them with another name! At least Sarah had Paul Revere and the British in Boston at the right time. Ms. Bachman, in announcing her presidential campaign, told the world she was proud of her home town which was also the home of American icon John Wayne. Unfortunately, it was actually the home of John Wayne Gacy, the killer clown serial killer. I'll refrain from killer clown comparisons, but I hope that the arrival of Ms. Bachman won't drive the more mainstream Republican candidates to pander even more to the lunatic fringe of the party who dominate the primaries.

Bachman like most Republicans want to take the Sheriff of Nottingham approach to solving our economic woes by robbing the poor to pay the rich. For example, she bemoans our 35% corporate tax rate as too high while suggesting we eliminate the minimum wage. She doesn't tell you that with deductions the corporate tax rate drops to around 27% and that the largest corporations seldom pay more than 15%. The Bachman plan calls for rolling back the tax which would presumably give the largest corporations an even bigger break. What these figures tell me is that there is room to reduce the taxes of small corporations which are engines of job creation while fixing the system so the large corporations with the biggest lobbying staffs and the biggest role in outsourcing American jobs pay their fair share. Clearly, this would require thought, something in short supply on both sides of Congress. It would be nice if Republicans could find their way back to being the party of Main Street, not Wall Street and Wackos.

Visioning Easton Again

Congratulations to the library for putting together a vibrant group of people to think about the future of Easton and the library's role in the community. The goal of the group, which I've blogged about before, is to simply help the library create a new goals statement. Not surprisingly the group had a lot of positive things to say about our library which has suddenly emerged as a lively community center. Without any prodding from the library staff, the group identified community connections as the library's biggest contribution to the town. Surprisingly, this group of talented people representing multiple ages and interests found their own connections, and hope to stay together after the goal setting is over.

This could be a positive for the town because the library went well beyond "rounding up the usual suspects" for the group, or more precisely the usual suspects were asked and chose to absent themselves from what turned out to be an exciting process. Instead of getting people who are linked into the political scene or unlinked and griping about it, the library group has a bunch of mostly fresh faces with new ideas or new spins on old ideas. Rather then the staid, but positive, visioning process sponsored by the town, the library group had enthusiasm and excitement. Interestingly, the main insight of the library group was the importance of  community building in an age that tends to pull communities apart. While the town's visioning was much more focused on projects and processes, its proposals were  also directed towards building a more cohesive community in the face of daunting challenges like diminished resources, the arrival of the train, and climate change. It's nice to know that the many of the ideas that bubbled up at the library meeting are already in process.

Using the library as a hub for all Eastoners to communicate and generate innovations is a low cost and effective way to meet the challenges of the future. Strangely, this is an idea that harkens back to the Great Library of Alexandria, the first library, which became a think tank for connection and innovation in the ancient world.

Whorled Loosestrife

The little plant above is called Whorled Loosestrife (scientific name Lysimachia quadrifolia). It's in bloom now at Sheep Pasture and throughout Easton. It's called whorled because the leaves are attached to the stem in a circular pattern. It shares the loosestrife name with the more well-known Purple Loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria). Both the common name and the Greek lysimachia mean release from strife. Lysimachus was a Greek king in ancient Sicily who supposedly used a member of this genus to pacify a maddened bull. According to one website colonists fed this plant to oxen so they would work together peacefully although with oxen one wonders how much that was necessary. The Iroquois used the roots of Whorled Loosestrife as an emetic.

One would think from the common names that the two plants are closely related, but the scientific name exposes the truth. Just as a refresher the scientific system of nomenclature was developed by Carl von Linné, an 18th century Swedish scientist. Remember Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species? Relationships between organisms get closer and closer as you move left to right in the previous sentence until members of the same species can produce viable offspring with each other. As it turns out things are not quite that simple, but, for our purposes, the system works pretty well.

Purple loosestrife is a beautiful, but dangerous invasive species that likes moist areas. It's often found on the banks of streams and ponds. Chet Raymo has written about it's varied and interesting reproductive strategies, but suffice it to say that it produces zillions of seeds that are long lived on the ground as well as mats of roots that regenerate if disturbed. Seeds of Purple Loosestrife came over in the ballast of European ships, and the plant has moved inland over the last two centuries. Since it crowds out native wetland species there have been numerous efforts to control it all of which have failed. At Sheep Pasture we've had some success stopping its spread by cutting it to the ground when it is in full flower. The theory is that the roots are putting out so much energy at that point that they might not be able to regenerate fast enough to beat out native plants.

Widespread testing of a European beetle that eats loosestrife is being done. One fear is that after the Purple Loosestrife is reduced, the beetles will turn to eating something else. Back to our Whorled Loosestrife which is a native of the eastern United States. It prefers uplands rather than streamside, but I've heard folks express concern that the European beetles might target this species as well as Purple Loosestrife. Here the scientific system of nomenclature tells us its unlikely to happen since the plants have different genus, family, order, and class. We're not home free, however, because there is at least one European moth caterpillar that feeds on both Lysimachia and Lythrum.

At any rate, see the Whorled Yellow Loosestrife now and watch for the Purple stuff in a few weeks.

The Big Hack and Some Interesting News

Sorry there was no posting yesterday, and sorry to those who clicked here thinking I'd be blogging about my shortcomings as a writer.  On Friday at 6:47 AM  many of you received an e-mail message from my AOL account. I don't know what the message line said, but if you opened it there was a website you could click on which seemed to lead to an online drugstore. Don't know what would happen if you actually did click on the link, but chances are you would have downloaded a worm that could have stolen passwords or data on your computer. Luckily, I got a call from a friend and e-mails from folks I hadn't heard from in several years telling me of the problem. I quickly discovered that someone had "hacked" the address book on my AOL e-mail. I sent out a message with a title line telling folks not to open e-mail from e1620 and set about tracking down the problem.

AOL was my first Internet service provider back in the dark ages of 600 baud dial-up modems. I'd stuck with them over the years for sentimental reasons as they declined from a major player in the field to an internet backwater that still charged for mail service. After 15 years I was receiving more SPAM than e-mails, had limited storage space so incoming messages were blocked, and got next to no special features. Ultimately, in 2010, I started to make the move to gmail only keeping the AOL account to catch anyone who I hadn't migrated to gmail. I must say that when I called AOL I got great customer service--from two people whose lines somehow got crossed when I called. The first five minutes of the service call was devoted to getting the automated calling system and then the second person off the line. Not a confidence builder for me! When that was taken care of the pleasant, non-outsourced young lady quickly took care of my problem-it seemed like it wasn't her first time at the rodeo. All that she did was change my password  and tell me to use the spam message button on the offending hack which would file a report at AOL (I'd already done that). No suggestions about anything else.

Subsequently, I've learned that AOL gets more than its share of break-ins by hackers. I would have much preferred to be part of the "I'm imprisoned in Switzerland, send money" scam than the more insidious and less glamorous one I was involved in. Hey, maybe we were hacked by the FBI or the NSA for that blog about Whitey Bulger. Let me know if any of you who weren't already on the terrorist watch list have been added in the last couple of days!

Still, luckily for the denizens of my AOL address book, we seemed to have dodged a bullet as long as no one opened the link. The hacker breached AOL's security and did not infect my computer according to the virus scan I ran. I'm running more scans today. My computer was also protected by basic firewalls provided by both my browser and by Verizon. I've deleted all the addresses from my AOL address book and deleted all messages as of Friday. I've abandoned the site, but left it open to serve as a trap site for future scams. Goodbye dear old AOL, you were a good friend in your time!

If you receive any email from e1620@aol.com do not open it. You can always reach me at the Curiosity Shop by posting a comment. Folks who belong in my address book will be hearing from me shortly.

Part of the good news that sprang from this disaster was the installation of Firefox 5.0 which just happened to arrive on Friday as well. This open source browser already has a number of cool features, but my favorite change is that my beloved steampunk browser theme has been updated. Left out of Firefox 4, my poor browser went from looking like the control panel of a Victorian gas factory to a simple Walnut paneled study. Now my switches and iron grill work have returned. More practically the folks that develop Firefox have found a way to make the browser even more useful. Samfind an add-on, allows me to scan through the news feeds of chosen sites and post the news in a narrow panel on the side of my browser. There, at the National Geographic RSS, I discovered that this year's 11 most endangered US Historic Sites were announced three days ago. This listing helped save our own Shovel Shops so you might want to check it out. I'd post a link, but hey, let's wait a few days.

Researching 70 Pond Street

The current owner of 70 Pond Street has applied for a partial demolition permit to remove an ell at the back of the house and replace it with an addition. This triggers the provisions of Easton's Demolition Review Bylaw which begins with an investigation of the history of the home. Without dealing with the merits of the proposal, I thought it might be interesting to discover exactly what we can know about an old house.

This kind of research became easier in 2010 thanks to the CPA and the Massachusetts Historical Commission which financed a historical survey by Kathryn Grover and Neil Larson. The pair will be expanding the survey in North Easton and adding Furnace Village this year. Grover and Larson are historians so each survey reads like a little story, and the story of 70 Pond Street is an interesting one.

Pond Street didn't become an official street in North Easton until 1881, but it was in use much earlier. It's noted in an 1850 deed, and in the 1870s and 1880s it is sometimes called the "coal road" probably because coal was carried along it to feed the furnaces on the Island, the original location of the Shovel Shop. The first house on the road, 46 Pond Street is itself a mystery. It is generally assumed to have been built in 1792 by a member of the Leonard family, but stylistically it seems older so perhaps it was moved from another location.  It was the original home of Oliver Ames when he moved to Easton in 1803. By 1855 there were seven houses on Pond Street. In 1850 the Ameses had given land on the north side of Pond Street for a Catholic Chapel and directly across the street  was the home of John and Margaret McDavit which many years later got the address 70 Pond Street. This is probably the third oldest house built on the street. John McDavitt was listed in the 1840 census as a resident of North Easton. He may have been the John McDavitt, servant, born in Ireland, who arrived in Boston in 1835. He was, therefore, one of the first Irishmen to come to Easton arriving well before the potato famine. Chaffin notes that until 1849 only about 45 Catholics lived in town. It is probably no coincidence that the first Catholic Chapel was located across the street from McDavitt's house since Pond Street was a focal point of the early Irish community. By 1850 the 52 year old shovel worker was doing very well owning $1,000 worth of real property. The 1853 valuation shows he owned two buildings and 3/4 acres of land. McDavitt, by then a widower, lived in town until at least 1880. Around 1860 he sold this house to the Ames Company who used it as a tenement until it passed into private hands in 1931.  It seems probable that early arrivals like McDavitt and neighbor Henry McArdle  facilitated the integration of later immigrants into the community and served as leaders of the early Irish community.

A Recipe for Crow

Whitey Bulger captured due to a tip to the FBI! FBI tweets news of capture! After 16 years it only took the women of America a couple of days to track down Whitey and his girlfriend? Hmm, seems a little suspicious to me, but let's go with it. I should definitely be eating crow after Tuesday's blog.

Crows have a poor reputation as a culinary delight mainly because of their scavenger lifestyle. However, since many delicacies like crab and lobster are scavengers as well, crow is probably edible. So here is a recipe for Crow Kebobs:

 Take 16 raw boneless, skinless crow breasts and marinate overnight in Italian dressing. On eight metal skewers skewer the breasts alternately with pieces of green pepper and sweet corn, cherry tomatoes, and button mushrooms. Brush the skewers with a generous amount of butter and place on a pre-heated grill for four minutes. Flip the skewers brush with butter again and place back on the grill for another four minutes. Repeat one more time for a total cooking time of 12 minutes.

Sounds delicious, tastes like chicken (Doesn't everything?).

So now that my cherished belief that the FBI didn't want to catch Whitey has been shattered (OK, dented because I can still see a conspiracy theory docudrama in my future), do I have to give up believing in 85 year old guys chasing 25 year old girls as well? Hef looks fairly spry to me so I think I'll hold on to that belief for  a while longer. Check back in 22 years.

Excuse the short blog today I've been scanning the skies for crows. Back to history tomorrow-the dead are so much more reliable than the living-thanks a lot Whitey!

An Interactive Map

The Chronicle of Higher Education published a fascinating interactive map about the educational accomplishments of state legislators across the nation. I present it here as an example of things you can do on the Internet that you can't do anyplace else. The page opens to a map of the US that shows the percentage of college graduates in each state. Move your cursor over a state to get the exact number or just enjoy the map as a graph. I was surprised to see that Massachusetts wasn't in the top 5 in college graduates, but Texas was. In fact, Massachusetts was only a little above the national average of 74%. Clicking on a state brings up a page with even more data. Graphs compare the state with the national averages for all state legislatures and all state residents. In Texas, for example, 48% of the legislature have a degree beyond a BA (or perhaps with politicians its a BS) while only 4% of the Texas population does. 71% of the state pols were educated in the Lone Star State. To the left of the graphs is a map of the state with blue dots. Click on the dot and it will tell you the name of the college and the number of legislators that went there (you may have to zoom the map for Boston). In Massachusetts only two legislators attended Stonehill and only three attended Bridgewater. Four went to Massasoit. The largest number of pols attended Suffolk which is just across the street from the State House. Although several Texas legislators were educated in Mexico only one Massachusetts legislator went to college outside the continental US at the University of Puerto Rico.

It might be more fun if the maps showed where the legislators had their bank accounts, but I suppose the Cayman Islands are hard to find even with Google Maps. Still you couldn't do this with a textbook where you are the prisoner of the author's point of view. Given my penchant for making fun of Sarah Palin you betcha I checked out the education of Alaskan legislators-70% went to college and 79% had attended schools outside the state compared to only 39% in Massachusetts. For what it's worth, that's "self-directed original research" which could only be done easily with internet media. The system isn't flawless. Google Maps locates Ellsworth College, which is apparently in Iowa, in the South Atlantic off Africa-although maybe it was some kind of foreign exchange.

The Internet has turned out so much better than what I thought it would be when I invented it back in 1972. Didn't mention that before? I was at my cousin's wedding in D. C. when I was introduced to a lovely young lady who was computer cataloging the Library of Congress collection. "Say", I said "Wouldn't it be a cool idea if you could actually put the books into a computer so everyone could access everything at any time?" OK, maybe we didn't invent the Internet, maybe we invented geekiness, but for the next hour we drank champagne and brainstormed all the implications of making all that stuff available. Sadly, I focused on the pretty girl and the champagne when I could have become Al Gore!

Octogenarian Edition

Hugh Hefner, 85, and James "Whitey" Bulger, 81, have been in the news recently. Hef, of course, lives in that legendary Xanadu, the Playboy Mansion, while Whitey lives God knows where. Poor Hef had his heart broken by his 25 year old fiancee Crystal Harris who broke off the engagement right before the wedding. She believes, according to a report in the Hindustani Times (don't say I won't go anyplace for a blog), that marriage is between one man and one woman and that she couldn't stand Hef's "womanizing." One wonders if Ms. Harris discovered that Hef wasn't checking out his magazines for the writing. The good news is that 85 year-old guys are apparently capable of womanizing and that Medicare will pay for an electric scooter to help in the chase.

On the other hand I wouldn't want to be Catherine Greig, the 60ish girlfriend of Whitey Bulger. Now I happen to believe that the FBI search for Whitey is a lot like OJ's search for the real murderer. After all if they catch the guy, he'll certainly sing about the corruption in the Boston FBI office that allowed him to commit at least 19 murders while he was serving as an informant. So what did the Feds do? They created a PSA fingering Greig and offering a reward of $100,000 which will appear on woman-oriented shows like The View, Dr. Oz, Regis and Kelly, and Ellen. It turns out Greig has some obscure habits that separate her out from all the other sixty year old women in the country like using beauty salons, having plastic surgery, and going to the dentist. Oh, and she likes dogs. If you know the Whitey Bulger story, you know he is a master of tying up loose ends, and it looks like the FBI is trying to remind him of his rep. One can picture the happy couple on the couch waiting for the Price is Right to come on when Whitey discovers the FBI's PSA on The View. Wouldn't want to be Ms. Greig at that point. The good news is that Whitey has been a one woman guy for at least 16 years. Perhaps the FBI should hire the suddenly available Crystal Harris to track down the fugitive. She found Hef and Whitey's $2 million reward should be a big incentive.

By the way you can catch the PSA on ITunes, the FBI's website, and its accounts on Facebook, You Tube, and Twitter. Can't quite get my head around an FBI Twitter account, but I suppose if you read everybody else's tweets you could get pretty good at writing your own. Oh well, good luck to Hef, the FBI (and the NSA in case they're eavesdropping as well) and bad luck to Whitey and the Yankees.

Van Cleef and Arpels

Rummaging around a junk draw in the curiosity shop I came across this little piece of jewelry.

This is the Walska Brooch and Pendant that was created by the New York branch of Van Cleef and Arpels in 1971. The wings can come off and become earrings, the tail can be worn separately as a brooch, and the jewel in the bird's mouth can become a pendant.

This beautiful piece can be found at an interesting Smithsonian online exhibit based on a real exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. Founded in Paris in 1896 during the latter part of Art Nouveau period, Van Cleef and Arpels opened a shop in New York in 1931 and became one of the dominant jewelry design houses of the 20th century.

The website opens on a quickly moving slide show based on dramatic nouns like Innovation, Transformation, etc. Click on any one of them to visit a page about that topic with many spectacular examples of fine jewelry. The black band at the top of the home page gives you access to the just mentioned pages as well as a page of you tube video interviews and the exhibition documentation. The site is a little quirky. Some of the slides move by rather quickly, but clicking on any slide sends you to another still picture with detailed descriptions. Other examples are hidden. There are navigation instructions at the bottom of major pages. Several of the pieces like the one below come from the collection of Elizabeth Taylor.  The site is definitely worth a look.

How Many Fish in the Sea?

How many fish in the sea? The answer is not as many as the commercial fishing industry would like you to believe. You can access a blow up of this map here. The map of the North Atlantic on the left shows the biomass in tons of popular food fish per square kilometer in 1900. The one on the right shows the same data for 2000. Clearly overfishing is destroying the fish stock of our favorite food fish like cod and haddock. The map is based on a statistical study called "Hundred-year Decline in North Atlantic Predatory Fishes." So we've screwed up the ocean as a food source, and there is very little evidence that things are going to change. We could all start eating sand lance like the Humpbacked Whales, but somehow I'm not expecting that on the Legal Seafood menu any time soon.

Interestingly, at least one article I've read recently from an environmental organization promotes fish farming. As you may know, most environmental groups have been down on aquaculture because poor practices can pollute the sea, introduce disease to wild populations, and weaken wild fish population with genes from escaped domestic stock. Obscured in these strong arguments are the pluses of fish farming. Fish fed on grain based pellets require less food to produce a pound of fish compared to chickens, pigs, or beef. Industrial production of livestock also produces more methane than similar sized fish operations. Unfortunately, as you can see by checking out the fish counter at any supermarket, most fish farms are in Asia where environmental regulations are more lax than in North America or Europe, but the article notes that China, a major producer, is set to upgrade its regulations regarding aquaculture. We'll have to wait and see.

The collapse of fishing stocks is another example of the Tragedy of the Commons, a basic environmental principle that proves that some kinds of free markets need government regulation to actually work. Here's the classic example. Imagine that Boston Common has been turned back to its original purpose of grazing land for people in the town. Imagine that 100 sheep can graze there and become fat and wooly. Imagine further that 10 shepherds have 10 sheep each there. One day a shepherd figures out that adding one more sheep to his flock will make him richer than the other 9 farmers. All 101 sheep will be a little less fat and wooly, but our capitalist shepherd will have 10% more sheep to sell less the tiny loss that is spread among all the sheep. The rational individual decision for all the other shepherds who have families to feed is to add sheep as well. Any shepherd who doesn't do so accepts all the losses in fat and wool that come to his sheep without the benefit of additional skinnier less wooly sheep to sell. Ultimately, the Common gets so overgrazed that no one can graze sheep there. The solution is for the ten shepherds to get together and regulate the number of sheep on the Common.  Unfortunately, the North Atlantic is vast, and the number of fisherman large and multinational so it has been difficult for the players to see that while it is always beneficial for you to pull one more cod out of the ocean; it is not good for the commons long term. Hence government regulation of fisheries is fought rather than accepted by the fishermen. Trevor Corson's 2005 The Secret Life of Lobsters tells how Maine lobstermen in a much smaller commons began self-regulation several generations ago. All in all, for New Englanders the travails of the fishing industry is of major importance both for our pocketbooks and our dinner plates.

Marie Antoinette Exonerated!

Marie Antoinette could never catch a break. Married to a dullard like Louis XVI, losing her head in the French Revolution, being played by Kristen Dunst in the biopic, Marie has been abused by contemporaries and historians alike. It probably all stems from that "Let them eat cake" remark. Being that oblivious to the needs of ordinary folks might give you a long run in the 2012 Republican primaries, but we've all been told it's the classic dumb comment that ended the French monarchy.

Except Marie apparently never said it. I followed an ad on Whale Wars to this interesting new site which can be found here and is a "frequently asked questions" center for issues raised in shows of the Discovery family of channels. It covers subjects from history to ecology to the hard sciences. Definitely worth a look.

According to Discovery, Marie never said the cake thing, and if she did, it was meant as a kindness. This is the favorite ploy I've learned as a Mock Trial Coach, "Yer Hona, my client wasn't at the scene of the crime, and if he were (we class things up at OA by using the subjunctive) he didn't do it." It seems like Marie is off the hook this time for sure. Researchers have traced the origin of the quote to either Jean Jacques Rousseau or Queen Maria Theresa of Austria. The exact quote was probably "let them eat brioche." Brioche is an expensive egg based bread that peasants couldn't afford. A French law allowed people to purchase brioche at the same price as regular bread if the cheaper bread ran out. So, if Marie actually said it she was taking bread out of the mouths of the rich to feed the poor-Marie Antionete, a true Obama Democrat!

Skipping School

Remember that sunny Spring day in 1969 when you ditched school to hang out with your friends? No? Well, we at the Easton Historical Society can help you. Rescued from the trash a decade ago, the Historical Society has a run of school attendance records that start in 1867 and end in 1970. They will be easily available for reference in the Society's new first floor library. Why would anyone want to take a look? The records often include the names of parents and the address where the student lived, a boon for genealogists., and unlike grade registers-"You got a D from Doc Harrison, Daddy? You told me you only got A's and B's"-there is very little embarrassing information in these records.

 An almost complete run of Town Reports will also be found in the Society's new library. For the period covered by the school registers researchers will be able to find an epidemic, like the Spanish Flu of 1918, in the Town Reports and then track it's true impact in the school absence records. The Historical Society will be taking its fragile pre-1910 town reports and xeroxing them to make them even more readily available to researchers. True OA high school yearbooks begin in 1949 and the Society will be putting these in the library as well. Prior to 1949 the school magazine served as the yearbook. Those magazines will also be included in the xerox project so that researchers can use them without damaging the fragile originals.

History is more than the story of the Washingtons and Lincolns. Your family, the families who lived in your home before you, and the people of your neighborhood are all important parts of America's story as well. Come discover it at the Easton Historical Society.

A Maggie Update

Long time readers may remember that the origin of this blog lies with my dog Maggie's medication schedule. She has to take a pill an hour before eating so I use that morning time to write the blog. Maggie seems to be doing OK in her fight against Cushing's Disease, and like a person with a chronic disease she is learning a lot about herself. For example, her medication makes her excessively hungry and thirsty. She's learned to tell time at least for that sixty minutes between her morning pill and when she is due for food. If I linger over the blog, she is usually at my feet reminding me its time to go. Without watching a single episode of Lassie, she's also learned the "Little Timmie's Down the Well" move to tell me if she has emptied her water bowl-run to the bowl, run back to me and look very excited, run back to the water bowl, repeat as necessary.

Maggie, at 14 lbs, is a large Pomeranian. With her characteristic Pom hair cut for summer she looks like a tiny sled dog and has the attitude to match. All Poms have a lot of Alpha dog attitude, and Maggie has that characteristics in spades since she was jumped by a Jack Russell as a puppy. Mastiffs and rottweilers have felt the wrath of Maggie's barks at least up to the moment when she determines that the dog really is a little too big to handle. Thus, I was amazed yesterday when after a little preliminary barking Maggie settled down for five minutes of quiet time with another Pomeranian. Is it possible she can recognize her own breed? Who knows, but she never gives up trying to intimidate other types of small dogs.

With other animals Maggie is at peace. Aside from an occasional woof at Edwin the Education Bunny or Blue the Rooster, she is a quiet observer of nature. Big Tom, the wild Turkey, usually a bundle of nerves, will walk within a few feet of Maggie, and she never chases squirrels or chipmunks either. In fact, the only animal she will chase are deer. This past winter we followed a deer track for half a mile through snow drifts before I got tired and turned her around. A live deer causes her to take off like a beagle after a rabbit. As you can see Poms are subject to delusions of grandeur.

Who is LG? A Cemetery Mystery

 Easton has so many cemeteries we occasionally lose one or two. One of the saddest moments in my career as a local historian is the loss of the grave of Doctor Seth Babbitt, the town's first doctor. Dr. Babbitt served in the French and Indian War, developed smallpox and died at his home in a far corner of South Easton. Since he died of a contagious disease, he was buried on his own land. Ultimately, his gravestone ended up in a stonewall where it still presumably rests. The last person to know the location was Ross Staples who invited me to visit the site with him. Of course, I didn't go immediately and by the time Ross' grandchild appeared in my local history class to jog my memory, he was in a nursing home.

Then there's the Elisha Harvey Cemetery whose marker was moved from the center of the YMCA parking lot to a site on the northeastern edge of the property. Rumors with some macabre details continue to circulate about what actually happened to the fifteen people buried here, there, or somewhere.

In 1986 I was in an expedition to find a cemetery that even Chaffin listed as abandoned a century before. This cemetery, located in Unionville, was thought to be threatened by a subdivision. The expedition never found the graves, but yesterday the intrepid Chairperson of the Cemetery Commission, Melanie Deware, called to say that she followed a tip and found a gravestone with the initials LG and a not so old flag with an American Revolution flag holder. A quick perusal of Chaffin shows that Lewis and Lemuel Gilbert both served in the Revolution; Lewis was in the East Militia which is an indication he lived in the general area of the cemetery. Neither seem to have left much trace in town, and, of course, in the first day of research it's quite possible that I missed another alternative LG.

If you know anything about these three cemeteries, shoot me an e-mail!

Triple Visioning in Easton

The Ames Free Library, Natural Resources Trust, and Easton Historical Society are at various stages of re-envisioning their role in our ever evolving town. The NRT will be starting its visioning process next weekend after three years of expert studies on conservation, forestry, and agriculture. With two new teachers coming on board, new programs for people of all ages will also be discussed.

The library, already an award winner as the second best small library in America, is also looking ahead with a committee made up of library patrons from high school students to retirees. There's lots to love about the library these days from the awesome staff to the active programming to the whole campus idea. The group found the library's slogan "Where the Community Connects" to be one of the rare occasions where the motto matches the action, and suggested ways the library could continue to grow as the town's cultural center. A final meeting of this committee will take place later this month.

The Easton Historical Society has been closed for a few months due to extensive restorations. Things have moved slowly at the Society for quite awhile; part of the restoration repaired damage done by the blizzard of 1978!  The little room in the south corner of the building is being turned into a reference library. Yesterday Jim Inman of Inman Galleries at Whistlestop Plaza was in hanging maps in the reference library including an 1825 map that has never been available to researchers before. The South Room, formerly the exhibit area has been turned into a classroom, study and meeting area. A big screen TV and wireless access will soon be available in that room along with a whole range of computer databases in a new computer in the ticket office. The Historical Society will begin offering minicourses in local history, genealogy, and old house research to name a few in the Fall. The South Room will also feature a small gallery of local artists. The North Room has become the new exhibition area. It will be freshened with new paint and a new rug shortly.

The Parker House Scrod Recipe

I was watching Emeril's Original yesterday as he visited three of the oldest restaurants in Boston. One was, of course, the Union Oyster House, the oldest continuously operated restaurant in America. The second was Doyle's, an Irish pub founded in 1882, and the oldest in the city. The last was the Omni Parker House which opened in 1855. Emeril's first job as a sous chef was at the Parker House back in the late 1970s. At the Parker House he focused on three "inventions" of the restaurant Boston Cream Pie, Parker House Rolls, and Scrod.

Every New Englander knows that scrod isn't any more of a fish than Boston Cream Pie is a pie. Scrod, whatever the origin of the name, is a small cod or haddock (chef's occasionally try to sneak in pollock as well) and is usually taken to be the freshest whitefish from the day's catch bought at dockside. That's not the conspiracy, however.

Watching Emeril go through the recipe for Parker House Scrod with Head Chef Gerry Tice, I thought it sounded much better than the cod with bread crumbs that mother used to make which made me a convert to broiled salmon. I missed part of the ingredient list, however, so I went to the internet to track down the recipe. It wasn't available at Emeril's website, but I did find a recipe from Chef Tice's appearance on another show:

 Parker House Scrod

Serves 4-6

Ingredients:
6(8oz.) filets of baby cod (use only cod)

1 cup milk
1 tsp. lemon juice

1/2 cup olive oil

2 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp. paprika

1/2 cup white wine
1/2 lb. melted butter

1/4 lb. Ritz crackers, finely crushed

salt and pepper to taste

Method:
1. Marinate in the refrigerator baby cod in milk, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper, olive oil and paprika for two hours (the longer the better).
2. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
3. Remove from marinade and dip each filet into cracker crumbs. Cover all surfaces well.
4. Place filets in buttered baking pan.
5. Drizzle with melted butter
6. Pour white wine into pan, being sure not to drizzle directly onto fish.
7. Bake until flaky, approximately 10 minutes. Do not overcook.
8. Place under broiler for a few minutes to finish and give color.

The marinade is the secret mother never bothered with. However, this morning through the wonders of video on demand. I relistened to the directions in the Emeril show and noticed several differences. First, the milk was replaced by heavy cream and second, garlic was an ingredient while Worcestershire Sauce and lemon juice wasn't mentioned at all. The filets were cooked in a skillet on stove top rather than baked. The finished product was finished with a lemon beurre blanc.

What's going on here? Starting with the cooking, the stove top method is probably used at the Parker House because of the heavy duty skillets and high temperature stoves in a professional kitchen. At the end of the cooking period which the show gives as 15 minutes not 10, the cast iron skillet could easily be popped under a broiler to finish. Home cooks would definitely do better with the baked method.

Lea and Perrin's original Worcestershire sauce is made up of vinegar, molasses, sugar, salt, anchovies, tamarind extract, onions, garlic, and probably cloves, soy sauce, lemons, pickles and peppers. According to Wikipedia the American recipe has replaced the sugar with high fructose corn syrup and the malt vinegar with distilled white vinegar.

The Worcestershire and the lemon juice would seem to lend a sharpness to the marinade missing from the TV version. I have no explanation for this other than most home cooks wouldn't bother with the Lemon Beurre Blanc so this might be a way to build the sharpness of the sauce right into the marinade. This is supported by the fact that at least some beurre blanc recipes include Worcestershire Sauce.

It seems that rather than hiding some kitchen secrets, Chef Tice is providing us with a home cook version of the classic Parker House recipe. I think I'd follow the recipe except to replace the milk with at least half and half and add a couple of chopped cloves of garlic to the marinade (milk is supposed to fight garlic breath by the way). I always get nervous drowning garlic in anything that is going to be sitting around for a couple of hours because theoretically it can promote the development of the botulism bacteria. However, milk is slightly acidic and the lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce even more so, add refrigeration and this will prevent bacteria growth for the two hour marinade.





If you don't have a recipe for Parker House Rolls may I suggest the Brown Irish Bread from the Sheep Pasture Farmer's Market? It's so much better than the white bread version!

A Day Off and a Blog on Customer Service

Writer's block that's what it was! I sat down to write the blog yesterday with a little foray into my top secret research draw. The research was fascinating-do you know you're walking around with ten times as many bacteria cells in and on your body than human cells-but the writing proved to be impossible.

It was probably Friday that did me in. Up at 4:30 to write the blog and then off to a charity golf tournament, then back to Easton to set up a party for the end-of-season meeting of the Hockomock Film Festival's Film Club, followed by periods two and three of the Bruins.

I'll spare you detailed information on the important discovery that people can be classified by gut bacteria type, and instead talk about the Consumer Reports article on customer service.

The charity tournament I played in was sponsored by an independent company that sells business electronics. They make a good living by being intermediaries between large computer companies and consumers. Their secret is good customer service and lots of "thank yous for your business". They also take on the hassles of dealing with Acer, Gateway, Dell, HP/Compaq, Sony, and Toshiba which received abysmal ratings for customer service from Consumer's Reports.

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a big fan of phone-in customer service so I usually take any computer problem right over to the Apple Store in Braintree. Apple topped the list in the CR ratings for both knowledgeable sales staff and computer tech support. I blogged about my positive experience there, and since then an OA student with an under warranty malfunction actually got a brand new and upgraded computer immediately as a replacement.

The big loser in the CR ratings was Walmart or anything associated with Walmart like Sam's Club, Walmart Supercenter, and the Walmart Pharmacy. Cheap stuff cheap is an attraction, but sales staff that sprint for the break room whenever you appear is not. For family shoppers a plan exists. Station a family member just out of sight at the end of an aisle where a clerk is located and then have the rest of the family charge down the other end of the aisle with puzzled looks on their faces. As the clerk flees, the stealth member steps into their path and asks the question. Unfortunately, the chances of catching anyone at Walmart who knows anything is slim.

I haven't shopped at Walmart since Target opened in Easton. In the latest Consumer Reports ratings Target never makes the top of the list in any category, but unlike Walmart it only falls to the bottom of the list in the small appliance category.

Independent stores had the best ratings for appliances. Jeff Hammond touted me onto George Washington Toma in a distant corner of the Westgate complex when I needed a washer and dryer. I had been doing price checks at Sears (usually OK service, but the store was busy the day I went in) Lowe's (I've never been impressed by their helpfulness) and Best Buy (limited choices, but a very helpful sales person). The sales staff at George Washington Toma was busy too since I was shopping at the end of the Mass energy savings period, but someone came right over and greeted me, asked what I was looking for, and put me on the list for the next available sales person. The salesman answered all my questions about top loaders and front loaders and found a water saving top loader in my price range. Delivery and installation was just as easy. I'm going back to GWT for a fridge this year.

One place I won't be going is Bay State Ford. I recently thought I had lost my electronic car key. I'd done that once in the Tanner Ford era, and they had me come in, sign a security form, looked up my key combination and made a new key. This time a brusque person on the other end of the phone told me I'd have to have the car towed to Bay State and then it would cost me $147 for a new key. Friends in the business told me to expect to pay about $80. Luckily I found the keys and went to Fernandes Lumber and had a spare key made. By the way, as the least handy of all handymen, I always go to Fernandes for the superior customer service and advice.

One surly phone response lost Bay State a customer. I'm also supporting the Right to Repair law so that Furnace Brook Motors can keep servicing my car and truck. I just want Bay State to know that
I'm over the Pearl Harbor thing now so if the Japanese would just stop killing whales, I'll be buying a Toyota next time. Say does anyone know where the nearest Hyundai dealership is located?

Paper Sculpture and a Sheep Project

Just a short posting today due to an early morning trip for me.

Calvin Nichols is an artist who creates incredible paper sculpture. I discovered his website through Eugene, a blogger for My Modern Metropolis, my favorite art/design site.

Not only are the sculptures incredibly accurate, they repay detailed viewing to discover how he does it.

A brief mention of New England weather in my Bruins post yesterday led me to do a little research on New England proverbs. As always the Internet was clear and definitive-weather proverbs make absolutely no sense at all unless, of course, they do. The ones that don't had their origins back in old England where they many may have come from the Bible. It says something about the innate conservatism of the British that they never noticed the weather proverbs for rainy England came from the desert!

Most weather proverbs that work don't really predict the weather, they indicate current conditions. For example high flying geese  in migration are a sign of good weather because migrating birds fly higher in high pressure cells which are associated with good weather. To forecast the weather you'd have to note the period when the migration changes from high to low flight. This proverb works because birds fly to their comfort zone when migrating to ease energy use and pressure decreases with height.

Here's one to check out this summer: "A cow with its tail to the west, makes weather the best; a cow with its tail to the east, makes weather the least." Cows do tend to graze with their tails to the wind apparently not bothered by the methane loaded farts that blow past their faces. Since east winds in New England tend to bring rain (and a lack of home runs at Fenway Park), cows turning around could signal a weather change. Here's my challenge-does this work for sheep? Route 138 runs north to south so as you drive by Sheep Pasture check out the orientation of our woolies and compare it with the wind. An alternative is buying your own cow weather vane!

OK, Charo is the talented proponent of Latin culture and Chara is the hulking defenseman of the resurgent Bruins. It's great to see New England getting back to its love affair with hockey after so many decades away. The great Robert Gordon Orr is the same age as I am, and I can still remember the voice of Fred Cusick coming through the radio at night telling Bruins fans that our savior was on the way from Junior Hockey. Hockey and baseball were my grandfather's favorite sports and he made sure I'd seen plenty of both before he passed away in 1961. The very first autograph I ever got was the aforesaid Mr. Cusick.

Before Bobby Orr kids played hockey outdoors on natural ice with broken sticks that had been taped again and again. We played without pads or helmets, and I still have dents in my leg bones from stopping shots as a goalie wearing only jeans over two pairs of long underwear. After Orr and the other Big Bad Bruins, it seemed like a million rinks were built, and hockey moved indoors for the career of Easton's Jim Craig. As a young teacher I remember attending a high school tournament game with OA's Craig in goal against the Randolph team lead by my student Rod Langway. Randolph won that night. Langway went on to a long career in the NHL and the Hockey Hall of Fame. Jim Craig went on to do something or other also.

The Bruins have been so-so to bad for so long many of the indoor rinks have disappeared, and hockey is once again a sport you can actually see kids playing informally on their own outdoors at the Yardley-Woods rink. High school and college hockey  remained an important part of the sporting landscape so it shouldn't be so surprising that all of a sudden everyone is a fairly knowledgeable hockey fan. I heard a complaint about watching hockey on TV last night that wasn't the usual newbie one of not following the puck. This person was complaining about not being able to see the action away from the puck-the one thing that makes live hockey ten times more fun than the TV version. Although the close-up of goalie Tim Thomas in a scrum with a Canuck was something you'd only see on TV.

It's hard to believe hockey has become a summer sport that I'm writing about on a day that's supposed to hit a hundred degrees, but let's enjoy it while we can. Even if the Bruins win the Cup, it's unlikely they will eclipse the Red Sox as the lingua franca of conversation starters in New England (it's unlikely the Sox will eclipse the weather in that regard, but that's another story. Do any people in the world talk about the weather more than New Englanders?). However, "How about those Sox?" works like a charm with just about anyone. I remember being introduced to a teacher from Jamaica in the early '70s who began our conversation with a posh British accent and New England twist "How about that Booma?" Referring, of course, to George "Boomer" Scott. I wouldn't recommend this as an opener in New York, by the way, but right now "Go Bruins" might work even there. But then again, the Rangers haven't won the cup since, when-was it 1918?

Herons over Easton

I've been walking with 5th graders through North Easton for many days, and doing a lot of fishing as well. Almost daily I've been seeing Great Blue Herons flying over the walkers or stalking the shallows of local ponds. I haven't seen so many Great Blues since the year they drained Old and New Pond to fix the dams leaving the fish high and dry. Standing up to four and a half feet tall and weighing four to eight pounds, the Great Blue Heron is one of our largest birds. It is common and widespread with subspecies all over the world, but it nests in colonies that are much more limited in distribution. The presence of so many birds in town lends credence to the report that there is a nesting colony in a secluded area of North Easton.

The Great Blue is a stealth hunter walking slowly in shallow water looking for fish and frogs. It's coloration makes for good camouflage along the shady edges of streams, and the bird can be so intent on its fishing that one can accidentally get very close to it. If you haven't been paying attention, this can be a very startling experience since this heavy bird has a hard time getting airborne on wings that may stretch six feet across.

I remember being in the Bridgewater Public Library researching reports of Bigfoot in the Hockomock Swamp. Among the other mythical denizens of the swamp are the less famous Mothmen.  As I was looking at a story about them, another patron leaned over and excitedly told me about a Mothman sighting made by his mother and father-in-law. "It was twilight, and they were driving down a road in the Hockomock in West Bridgewater when a tall thin man flew right over the hood of the car." I listened politely while all the time thinking to myself it's city folk who have never seen a Great Blue struggling to get airborne.

The pond at Stonehill has hosted a nest of Green Herons for many years. Green Herons are much smaller than Great Blues and often keep their neck pulled in. I've seen this species both at Stonehill and at Pine Oaks Golf Course. They are a much gaudier bird than the Great Blue  as you can see from this picture taken from Wikipedia:

The ponds of Easton add to the avian diversity of the town and looking for herons is a lot easier than hunting for tiny sandpipers and plovers.

Grading Sarah

You've probably never had the nice kid in class that always manages to screw up history in his or her head. I have. In fact in my first year as a teacher. I had the nice boy whose story about the underground railroad had the escaped slaves pulling aside bushes to find the hidden subway tunnel. It appears that a number of college professors have had those students as well. What you do in order to grade those kids is tie yourself into knots looking for a grain of truth you can give a few points to. That's exactly what those "experts" that are telling you that Sarah Palin wasn't wrong about Paul Revere are doing.

The British were perfectly competent soldiers. In the weeks and months before April 19th, British officers, sometimes disguised as civilians, rode out along main routes gathering intelligence about the mood of Massachusetts citizens. There is evidence in letters that they even headed down Bay Road as far as Taunton. On the night of the 19th scouts were sent well ahead of the main British units to make sure the road to Lexington and Concord were clear. Remember that their mission was to capture Patriot leaders John Hancock and Sam Adams in Lexington and colonial munitions in Concord. Paul Revere and two others were sent to warn Hancock and Adams and alert the Minuteman system. His purpose was not to warn the British about anything. The British knew they were likely to face opposition since an early mission to remove powder Charlestown in September, 1774 triggered the Minuteman system and started militias from as far away as Connecticut marching to Boston. The fact that Revere blurted out that the militia had been warned to the British riders who captured him must have come as no surprise to the British, but it does show that Revere was a worthy intellectual predecessor to dear Sarah.

So to sum up, Palin lucked out that Revere was as dumb as she is and blew the mission to the first British guys he ran across. That was not his original purpose. Warning the British wasn't his goal. Sorry Sarah you're getting a C- on this one and only because I don't want to crush your self-esteem.   "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, then to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

If a bus pulls up next to you and asks for directions to H.H. Olmsted's Crockery, please send Sarah to the nearest mall.

Northern Woodlands

One of the most interesting environmental magazines around today is Northern Woodlands:A New Way of Looking at the Forest. Its main focus is how good forestry practices can enhance the environment something we will be talking about more during the summer. It's regular features add a lot to the knowledge base of anyone interested in the outdoors. For instance, in the Calendar feature for the second week in June I learned that female hummingbirds are now building their nests using bud scales lashed together with spider silk camouflaged with lichens and lined with soft plant down. Sounds cozy.

I also learned that newly emerged female mosquitoes and all males feed on plant nectar and are important plant pollinators. Somehow that doesn't make me want to swat them less, but it does make me wonder even more about the environmental impact of widespread spraying, both pro and con. Given the way the year has started with dozens of mosquitoes waiting at my door every morning for breakfast, I bet we'll be hearing a lot about West Nile and EEE.

Michael Synder in the Wood Whys section has an interesting article on leaves. Turns out the leaves on any individual tree are different depending on whether they are mostly in the sun near the top of the tree or mostly in the shade near the interior of a branch or the base of the tree.

Shade leaves are bigger, thinner, and hang from a branch horizontally. These are all adaptations to gather as much light as possible from a dim environment. Extra size and the horizontal orientation provides more surface area to catch whatever light is available. The thinness is the coolest adaptation. It allows the dim light to penetrate to the photosynthesis cells inside while keeping the trees investment in cells that need to be fed to a minimum. The purpose of the shade leaves is insurance. While the sun leaves provide the energy needed for growth in height and diameter, the sun leaves insure that a tree in the shade of another has the energy to hang on season after season.

Sun leaves risk drying out in the sun so they have special adaptations as well. Overheating can also reduce photosynthesis. Sun leaves tend to be smaller, thicker and held vertically, almost parallel to the sun's rays. The smaller size and often additional waxy layers and hairs reduce water loss. The thickness also comes from multiple layers of photosynthetic cells because the suns rays can penetrate deeply into an exposed leaf. The orientation also minimizes overheating and water loss, but because so much light hits a sun leaf the orientation of the leaf does not limit its ability to photosynthesize.

Find the nearest tree and test this out!

Goodbye Video Mania; Hello Class of 2011

I arrived at Video Mania on Route 106 in Mansfield yesterday to return some videos only to discover they will be closing by the end of the month. Video Mania is the last video store in the area, and the closing had been in the works for more than a year as the store shrank to half its original space. It's a sad passing. Like a good independent book store (Paperback Junction), the manager got to know your likes and dislikes and could make recommendations. They also sent out a weekly e-mail highlighting new additions.

Market forces did them in. Since most people rent recent releases, the nearly ubiquitous red boxes cut into that aspect of the business. Netflix with its excellent system of recommendations and increasing number of streaming offerings cut into the cinephile end of the business as did free offerings at public libraries. Various systems that allow you to own the digital download of a film are even making sale of physical DVDs obsolete, something that kept Video Mania going for several years. The slow switch from tape to DVD strained the resources of many video stores, and the increasingly rapid switch to Bluray was even more difficult.

Once again we've traded a human social experience for convenience and computerization. I can't say that isn't a good thing; I love watching videos on my computer  and searching Netflix and the Internet Movie Database for recommendations. Still what is going to happen to us if we keep cutting back on social interaction?

Congratulations to the Class of 2011 which graduates at Frothingham Park today at 2. Even though I officially retired in 2008 and don't have much contact with students in my one little class, it's been a real joy working with this year's seniors who are bright, talented, and ambitious. Hopefully, they can get busy and save the world! No stress! Best Wishes!

The Dunbar Number

The Dunbar number refers to Robin Dunbar and his book How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks which was reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Dunbar is an anthropologist and evolutionary biologist who tries to explain our behavior by looking at the adaptations that have made us human.

One of Dunbar's points is the importance of family to survival. He ties together statistics on survival in extreme conditions like the Donner Party or the Pilgrims first winter to show that even old people and children in families survive better than even virile unattached young people. More benign stats show that  children in larger families tend to get sick less often than children in small families and that 76% of Americans rate family as the most important thing in their lives.

Not great news for a singleton like me, but Dunbar also looks at friendship networks as well as family. He suggests that our brain has evolved to be close to about 150 people including family and friends, about the size of most Neolithic villages and associations of interrelated hunter-gatherer bands. That 150 number is the Dunbar Number.  Dunbar suggests on average that we have 3-5 close friends we speak to at least weekly and about 10-15 more friends who we might not be in contact with as often but whose death would distress us. These inner circles can include relatives. The other 120 folks that the brain keeps in its rolodex are less close and can drop off the brain's list if connections aren't maintained. Dunbar also asserts that kinship links last longer than friendship links even if they aren't cultivated as often.  All of the above is about averages, by the way,  they don't account for people like Fran Ialenti who remember the names of every student, their parents, and grandparents. As George Carlin once said take a look at how dumb the average guy is and remember that half the people are dumber than that. Clearly, I exceeded my Dunbar number a long time ago no wonder I have trouble remembering names! Hooray, here's a time when I'm ecstatic to be in the lower half of the bell curve!

A couple of interesting points on my own. First, Dunbar's three levels of association certainly have some kind of connection to Aristotle's three levels of friendship. Wish I had Dunbar's research when we were talking about this in Philosophy class, but student discussions (even the Facebook generation) tend to confirm Dunbar's ideas. Second, the adaptation that leads to the Dunbar number, 150 associates before the neocortex starts to overload, is similar to the way our short term memory has evolved. Studies there show the brain is adapted to remembering a maximum of seven digits in short term memory. Ever get a phone number from 411 with no ability to write it down? If you can't offload the area code quickly as the familiar 508, you'll have a relatively hard time remembering it because it exceeds the seven digit limit. Finally, the Dunbar number of 150 is between the other anthropological magical numbers of 30 and 300. Th number 30 is about the size of the largest group of people anthropologists have found which doesn't need some kind of leader to function. Small hunter-gatherer bands of this size function with group discussion and total freedom of the individual to choose another path. At 300 human groups pass from relatively informal headman or headwoman systems to more formally organized governments. This too must have some relationship to the Dunbar number.

Are You Listening Now, Stupid?

The title of today's blog is a suggestion for naming a sequel to Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, but then one of my character faults is being unduly confrontational. In the wake of a three tornado day in Massachusetts take a look at "Are You Ready For More?" in this week's Newsweek. Sitting in OA's auditorium for Class Night listening to the thunder and wondering whether Maggie was going to be blown to Oz before I got home did not make for a pleasant evening. As an aside, Maggie would have taken care of the Wicked Witch on her own and the flying monkeys too.

Pollsters for the President robocalled me last night. I like President Obama well enough and found that I could still blame his less than illustrious predecessor for the lousy economy. But all the poll questions were about the economy, it's not the economy, stupid! After three years of little action the Obama administration now owns climate change as much as Bush, Clinton, Bush. Stimulus money should have been better focused on converting to a green economy rather than pork projects like high speed rail.

Given that the world has probably passed the tipping point on avoiding dramatic climate change, the predictions for Easton are disturbing. Expect much, much warmer weather with more thunderstorms. Given that we've had one tornado and several microbursts in the last 60 years, we're probably in line for more. Some are predicting an increase in hurricanes, some aren't, but it seems certain we will continue to see periods of extremes with drought alternating with periods of torrential rains or record snows. Don't forget we've had one major dry summer and two "fifty year" floods in the last six years. Add in two snow droughts and a near record year of snow, and you can see that unpredictable is becoming the new predictable.

Thus, water-what to do with too much or too little,  energy to run our air conditioners, and emergency plans for the inevitable "unexpected" natural  events should become major town priorities. We continue to putter along in Easton doing the limited things a single town can do and  doing more than most. Among several positives such as the new solar field and solar field zoning, our leaders haven't made the mistake of listening to those who want to ship our sewage to Brockton. Rumors from many sources  hath it that this "solution" is being pushed by a large developer with visions of high rises dancing in his head, but it is absolutely the worst idea for Easton. It would ship millions of gallons of water outside our watershed making water bans and perhaps even water shortages possible in times of extended drought. We need to develop a solution to clean our water to "state of the art" standards not just "stated mandated" standards and keep it here for our use. We all start doing our part by conserving water-something our Water Department works hard at doing. That reminds me, I need to schedule getting my water meter changed…

Musings and Two Links

Wow, a huge typo in the first line of yesterday's blog. This aging process is not a pleasant thing. I started having trouble remembering names about twenty years ago. The first time it happened, when a student from the previous year knocked on my classroom door in October and I couldn't remember her name, it was terrifying. Now it happens all the time. Of course, it's made me much more outgoing than the typical Yankee-I'm prone to assuming I already know someone, say hi and start a conversation. A kind of defensive friendliness from someone who's really very shy.

After teaching for so long and seeing so many misspellings I suppose it was inevitable that I'd start spelling words incorrectly, but lately I've been having trouble with there, their, and they're and, as in yesterday's blog here and hear. It's like my brain has to be constantly watched or it will sneak off and do something stupid. The doctors tell me it's all a symptom of sleep apnea, or diabetes, or even low cholesterol. I guess I'll have to fire up the old cpap machine and see if I get smarter again.

On the other hand I am getting ancient. I was back in the old neighborhood in Braintree yesterday where I spent my first twelve years. One of my earliest memories was waking up one morning and finding our front yard covered with newspapers from Worcester-pushed all the way there by the remains of the great tornado of 1953. Or to be more precise, because precision is called for more and more these days, I remember the papers in the yard and my mother telling me they were from Worcester.

Let's end with a couple of links. Here's a link to a story in Newsweek by Allegra Huston about discovering that her famous father John wasn't her father. It's a memory brought back by the recent "Arnold episode" because she was told shortly after Huston had run off to Mexico with the family maid. It's actually a well written and ultimately a very happy story about modern families.

The other link comes from My Modern Metropolis, my favorite art and design blog. It features the photos of the three Bell sisters from England. All three were home schooled in a style reminiscent of John Dewey-if the kids showed an interest in something the parents provided the materials for them to explore and a push in the right direction. It seems to have worked out very well as the girls have produced sweet, beautiful and sometimes sentimental photos to support a business based around photo tips, photoshop filters, and prints, Here are examples:

You can visit their very commercial website here. Despite the emphasis on commerce there is a lot to explore-great English landscapes, etc.

Character Study

I got to here Mitt Romney and Sal DiMasi in a single day. I was chaperoning a couple of students to Student Government Day, and the Governor made a rare appearance to talk to the students. That's not a criticism of Mitt-he showed up, most governors don't. He wasn't running for President then and gave a great speech about his Olympic experience and the need to get involved. He was sincere, focused, and interesting. I keep hoping to see that Mitt on the campaign trail, but I guess his desire to get elected and his political consultants have banished that man forever.

Sal DiMasi was a total ass. Addressing the students in the House Chamber, he came across as a total thug reveling in the power of the speaker's office and telling students how great he was. This from an idiot who is hopefully going to be convicted because he was too dumb not to call his co-conspirators on the day his corruption story broke. How many crooked speakers in a row is this? Why aren't we standing on street corners with petitions to amend the state constitution to limit the power of the Speaker?

Wake Forest University has established a special program for character study. The program takes a cross disciplinary view, and the website has a plethora of articles and information. They are even sponsoring an essay contest to explain character studies to laymen. The goals page of the project raises five interesting questions. Check it out if you have a philosophical turn of mind.