Remembering Tommy Ashton, Murdered On 9/11

Posted on September 11, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

Twelve years ago today, my cousin Tommy Ashton was struck down in his prime by the Al Qaeda terrorists who engineered the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center.

From the New York Times great Portraits of Grief memorial:

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In addition:

Here’s where he lives on in the 9/11 Memorial Guide.

But here’s where Tommy really lives on: In the tireless efforts of his sisters Colleen and Mary, who have run the Tommy Ashton 3-on-3 Basketball Tournament for the past [eight] years, raising over $250,000 to “[provide] charitable donations in the name of Thomas Ashton to institutions, organizations, worthy causes and individuals, including contributions to philanthropic endeavors and to community enhancing activities.”

We miss you every day, Tommy.

Just as we remember you each year.

 

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Dead Blogging The Boston Mayoral Debates

Posted on September 10, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

That’s right – debates with an s.

Monday night there were two Boston mayoral shindigs: The Create the Vote forum at the Paramount Theater, and the NECN/Boston Herald/Suffolk throwdown at the (almost) next-door Modern Theatre.

The hardsitting staff endured almost three hours of the 12-way dustup, so our remarks here will be brief.

Start with the banged-out Paramount bakeoff, which featured nine of the mayoral candidates and a focus on the future of arts and culture in Boston.

Good news: Every one of the nine promised to be “the arts mayor of Boston.”

Bad news: Never gonna happen.Unknown

High/lowlights of the forum:

Biggest Panderer: Rob Consalvo referring (multiple times) to “the privilege” of working for Ted Kennedy and receiving one of Kennedy’s artworks for his wedding.

Biggest Overpromise: John Connolly said “walking into City Hall should be like walking into the Apple Store.” Yeah, but . . . not enough Geniuses, right?

Biggest Oxymoron: “The Clemons Administration.”

Biggest Disappointment: Wait for it . . . Charlotte Golar Richie.

Biggest Scofflaw: Charles Clemons, who bragged about his Dorchester pirate radio station, which still owes $17,000 to the FCC.

Timex Award: Golar Richie arrived late, Mike Ross left early.

Signs o’ the Times: Marty Walsh had the most – and the most vocal – sign holders outside the Paramount.

Screen Shot 2013-09-10 at 9.10.42 AMThe Create the Vote forum, however, was a pillow fight compared to the NECN dustup, which variously featured:

• Bill Walczak calling the proposed Suffolk Downs casino a “public health disaster”

• Charlotte Golar Richie saying, No – gun violence is a disaster and casino loot should go toward crime prevention

• Charles Clemons saying, No – gambling is a disaster

• Dan Conley saying – after all kinds of waffling – that his kids don’t go to public school because he wanted a religious education for them

• Connolly defending Conley (confusing!)

• Charles Yancey “not criticizing Conley” but referring to candidates’ “levels of investment” (confusing!)

• David James Wyatt saying nothing

• NECN’s Alison King asking Richie about her supporters trying to cull the minority candidates

• Richie asking King if she’ll pose the same question to the white candidates

• A whole lot of candidates square-dancing about letting Chick-fil-A and WalMart into Boston despite their anti-gay, anti-labor practices

• Marty Walsh contending he can effectively negotiate with labor unions that are bankrolling his campaign

• Others contending he cannot

• David James Wyatt saying nothing

• A Suffolk University student asking about the drug molly and subsequently being called “Molly”

• Blah blah blah community policing

• Blah blah blah Dan Conley failing badly

• David James Wyatt speaking!

• But saying nothing

• Candidates saying Tom Menino should stop being mayor seeking a new school superintendent

• Candidates saying Tom Menino should keep being mayor cutting development deals

• Candidates saying both

• Candidates saying Tom Menino should stop being mayor, period

As a matter of fact, Menino will stop being mayor in three months. And one of these guys – or gal – will replace him.

How do you feel about that?

 

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Hey, Rafa CAN Beat This Guy (2013 U.S. Open Edition)

Posted on September 10, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

That was sweet.

Rafael Nadal, who two years ago had Novak Djokovic so far inside his head Djokovic should have been paying condo fees, now officially owns him.

Exhibit A:

 

That’s 13 Grand Slams.

And counting . . .

 

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NYT Slowbituary Of Manson Whitlock (Typewriter Repair Division)

Posted on September 9, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

Last week the hardworking staff noted the passing of Manson Whitlock, typewriter repairman extraordinaire.

While the hardwaiting staff continues to monitor the Boston Herald for a Seamus Heaney obituary, we came across this excellent Washington Post obit of the redoubtable Manson Whitlock (via Monday’s Boston Globe):

Manson Whitlock; kept typewriters clacking

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WASHINGTON — Manson H. Whitlock, one of the country’s longest-serving repairmen of the clattering keyboard contraptions known as typewriters, died Aug. 28 at his home in Bethany, Conn. He was 96.

The New Haven Register first reported his death. The cause was not disclosed, but Mr. Whitlock closed his shop in June, when he was hospitalized with a kidney ailment.

Once ubiquitous in offices and on the dorm-room desks of college students, typewriters have all but fallen silent in recent years, as they have been replaced by computers. But Mr. Whitlock kept plugging along, as a dwindling number of customers hunted the streets of New Haven and knocked on the door of his second-floor shop near the campus of Yale University.

He had been on the job since 1930, when he began working at his father’s bookstore. Before long, he took charge of the typewriter department. He sold thousands over the years, and customers returned to him for replacement parts and for repairs when the keys became stuck or the carriages wouldn’t return on their Royals, Remingtons, Smith Coronas, and Underwoods.

Money quote:

He drew the line at computers, which he never learned to use. As he told the Christian Science Monitor in 2007, ‘‘You work a typewriter, a computer works you.’’

Sunday’s New York Times finally caught up thanks to this Margalit Fox slowbituary (print headline):

Manson Whitlock, 96; Repaired Typewriters

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For eight decades, Manson Whitlock kept the 20th century’s ambient music going: the ffft of the roller, the ding of the bell, the decisive zhoop … bang of the carriage return, the companionable clack of the keys.

From the early 1930s until shortly before his death last month at 96, Mr. Whitlock, at his shop in New Haven, cared for the instruments, acoustic and electric, on which that music was played.

Mr. Whitlock was often described as America’s oldest typewriter repairman. He was inarguably one of the country’s longest-serving.

Over time he fixed more than 300,000 machines, tending manuals lovingly, electrics grudgingly and computers never.

That’s some nice writing. Just a little bit late.

 

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Correction o’ the Day (Rupert Murdoch Pie Face Edition)

Posted on September 9, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

From Sunday’s New York Times:

THE ARTS

Because of an editing error, a picture caption on Wednesday with an article about “Rupert,” a cabaret-style dramatization of the life of Rupert Murdoch staged by the Melbourne Theater Company in Australia, misstated the setting of the scene shown in which the character playing Mr. Murdoch is about to be hit by a shaving-cream pie. It is during a family argument, not when he arrives to testify before a parliamentary panel. (In 2011 a protester attacked Mr. Murdoch with a plate filled with shaving cream during a hearing at the British Parliament.)

Okay then.

Glad we got that sorted.

 

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Why The New York Times Is A Great Newspaper (NYC Voting Blocs Edition)

Posted on September 8, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

Front page of Saturday’s New York Times:

Screen Shot 2013-09-08 at 2.33.03 AM

The Voters with Influence link featured this spectacular graphic:

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Damn.

That’s impressive, yeah?

 

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NYT Targets Boston Shootings Rise

Posted on September 8, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

Saturday’s New York Times took a big swing at the rise in Boston gun violence since the April Marathon bombings.

Violence Rises in Boston Off the National Stage

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BOSTON — The Boston Marathon bombings produced an outpouring of attention to this city, but in violence-prone neighborhoods like Roxbury and Dorchester, some say the attention has made them feel only more isolated.

“Since April 15, we’re at over 115 shootings,” a city councilor, Tito Jackson, told a Boston police officer from the department’s gang unit at a public safety meeting at a Roxbury community center late last month.

Consequently, “in the nearly five months since the marathon . . . community activists, clergy members and others have used the mounting tally of shootings to call attention to the everyday reality of violence and to push for measures to address the weapons trafficking, gangs and fundamental mistrust between the community and the police that they believe contribute to it.”

In other words, plus ça change and etc.

But something new: Jamarhl Crawford of Blackstonian.com made his Times debut in the piece.

The tally — which rose to 124 with a shooting in Mattapan on Thursday — is showcased daily in an image designed to look like a marathon runner’s number on Blackstonian.com, a Web BOSTON-2-articleInlinesite aimed at black Bostonians. The image, which has spread on Facebook, Twitter and other social media, was created by Jamarhl Crawford, a writer and graphic artist who is running a write-in campaign for Mr. Jackson’s council seat and who convened a rally at City Hall last month to mark 100 shootings since the marathon.

All of 40 people showed up, but why get technical about it.

For scale, there’s this: “As of Aug. 26, there were 185 shootings in Boston this year, compared with 164 during the same period last year. That is well below the more than 400 shootings a year that took place in the early 1990s, but it is likely to overtake the fewer than 200 shootings a year recorded during most of the late ’90s.”

So it’s better but it’s worse.

Plus ça change and etc.

 

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That’s Just So Stupid! (Jeff Koons ‘Balloon’ Payment Edition)

Posted on September 7, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

Full-page ad from Friday’s New York Times:

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Seriously?

Thirty-five million dollars for a tired, lame-to-begin-with koncept?

That would make history alright.

Historic idiocy.

 

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Why The Wall Street Journal Is A Great Newspaper (‘Crisis Plus Five’ Edition)

Posted on September 7, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

Friday’s Wall Street Journal debuted Crisis Plus Five, “a series on the fallout from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”

First installment:

P1-BM982_LEVERA_NS_20130905190010For Corporations and Investors, Debt Makes a Comeback

Looking back, J. Russell Porter said his company was “almost at death’s door” when the U.S. economy hit bottom.

With credit markets near frozen, he said, Gastar Exploration in 2009 couldn’t find banks or investors willing to provide the $35 million the oil-and-gas producer needed to refinance its crushing debt.

Mr. Porter, Gastar’s chief executive, concentrated on survival. He sold off a major project and repaid most of the company’s obligations. In financial terms, Gastar was deleveraging, or reducing its dependence on debt to minimize risk, part of a broader trend triggered by the financial crisis.

But . . .

This year, Mr. Porter reversed course. Gastar borrowed $200 million in the junk-bond market to acquire oil wells in Oklahoma. It offered an 8.625% interest rate on the bond, which investors eagerly grabbed. The money fueled quick growth.

Five years after excessive debt propelled a housing-market collapse into a financial crisis and recession, similar bets are being placed across the U.S.

In addition to examples like Gastar, Friday’s Journal also featured lots of graphics like this:

P1-BM985B_STAND_G_20130905202119

 

That’s some serious reporting, yeah?

You should check it out.

 

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Baker’s Double In Boston Globe?

Posted on September 6, 2013 by Campaign Outsider

Would Charlie Baker by any other name be more electable?

From today’s Boston Globe (print headline):

06baker01Baker working to project a warmer image

GOP candidate for governor vows to listen, not repeat ’10 mistakes

SWAMPSCOTT — Seated next to his wife on Thursday morning in the sun-soaked foyer of their sprawling home, Charles D. Baker said friends had approached him after he lost his 2010 challenge to Governor Deval Patrick with a damning verdict on the level of authenticity he had projected on the campaign trail.

“The guy I know, I didn’t see him,” Baker said they told him.

Lauren Baker laughed, “I even felt that way.”

Hey, imagine how we feel. We thought his name was Charlie . . .

Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.

 

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