Here and There Thursday

If you haven't heard, Rick Perry's presidential campaign self-destructed last night. There's lots of ways I could go with this story, but I've had too many of those brain freezes myself to follow my natural inclination to make fun of a guy who wants to get rid of the education department, but can't remember a list that is three items long. The evidence is pretty clear that Perry isn't smart enough to be president and that Herman Cain is the second coming of Horny Bill Clinton. I guess it's a good thing that the far right of the Republican Party, which somehow managed to survive Cheney-Bush, is sinking like a stone leaving a grown-up candidate like Mitt Romney as the front runner. The sad thing is that both Obama and Romney are so enthrall to special interests that once again nothing good will happen about the key issue of the age-human induced climate change.

I've become addicted to my Nook news aggregator apps Pulse and Taptu. Pulse allows you to organize 60 news sources into five pages while the newer Taptu allows you to select a hundred sources and then mix them into single feeds. One Taptu created mix checks 27 sources at once!  Pulse is more like a newspaper while Taptu captures a lot of the cacophony of the internet. My Front Page on Pulse includes feeds from the Enterprise, Easton Journal, and Easton Patch. I don't know how that business model is supposed to work, but I love having the latest local news at my finger tips. It's like the days of my childhood when the family listened to WJDA in Quincy for the local news for the Braintree area and the latest from Bob and Ray.

Unfortunately, I've organized my Taptu feeds with a dozen environmental sites at the top-very depressing! It doesn't help that I followed that up with a half dozen sites on dinosaurs-the destination we're heading for if we don't do something about the environment. I should definitely move the political feeds to the top-there's something to be said for starting the day with the comics.

Interesting story in the Journal about the proposed Beech Tree Estates on Deport Street. It would be an open space residential development that would put 4 homes on three acres of a 16 acre site. The houses would be about 500 feet from the street so the site would retain its rural character. OSRDs are the best of the newer development tools available in Easton because they preserve a lot of open space, but we shouldn't forget that any residential development is likely to be property tax negative since most homes receive more in town services-mostly schools-than they pay in taxes. Don't know why we still don't require 150 acres per house lot like we did when the town was founded! Even a McMansion would blend into that much space.

Permaculture is a combination of landscaping and horticulture that aims at producing food (for both people and animals) year after year while mimicing a natural landscape. I've been fascinated with this for years and will be blogging on it over the weekend. Tomorrow is Veteran's Day so expect something soldierish as I struggle to come up with a speech for our parade.