‘On The Media’ Nails Jell-O To The Wall

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

(Fun fact to know and tell: When asked why there’s a hyphen in Jell-O, the great Fred Allen said, “That’s where the banana goes.”)

When we last left On the Media, NPR uber-personality Ira Glass had tasked the show with proving that NPR is not at all liberal.

On the Media – you are the perfect vehicle for this – you were made for this purpose: To measure the political bias of public radio.

It needs to be done – you are the only ones – you are the ones best positioned of everyone in the country, in the public radio system, in the world – to do this mission, and I hand it to you.

It’s an urgent mission and it needs to be done and done beautifully.

So this weekend’s edition took a stab at it.

You can listen to the results here.

The hardworking staff will provide transcript excerpts on Monday.

UPDATE: Here they are.

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Boston: The City That Never Works

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

Exhibit A: The endless proposals for a Boston City Hall Plaza Redesign.

Exhibit B: Boston’s non-existent Bike Share program.

Exhibit C: Boston’s non-existent Tommy’s Tower.

Exhibit Umpteen: Boston’s Food Truck Challenge.

From Saturday’s Boston Globe:

Food trucks in Boston get off to rocky start

Operators complain of city bureaucracy

It was one of the city’s more celebrated initiatives: attract food trucks to Boston by staging a contest for the right to operate on City Hall Plaza.

But the Food Truck Challenge offered by Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s administration last year is running into some obstacles just as spring arrives, with one of the three winning contestants backing out and some of the other food truck operators complaining about the city’s bureaucracy.

So what else is new?

But wait – what about the boffo Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway food truck expansion? From the Globe piece:

One location where food trucks have been successful is the Rose F. Kennedy Greenway. The Greenway is expanding from one food truck during last year’s pilot vending program to several this year, said Nancy Brennan, executive director of the Rose F. Kennedy Greenway Conservancy.

“We have worked collaboratively with the city throughout this process,’’ she said.

Only in Boston would going from one to “several” be considered a triumph.

Yeesh.

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Public/Private Sector Compensation Bakeoff (Renée Loth Edition)

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

(More grist for the public employee salary mill)

From Renée Loth’s Saturday Boston Globe op-ed:

Although public sector workers as a whole in Massachusetts do earn more than workers in the private sector, the difference is largely explained by the fact that most public workers are better educated. The private economy includes everyone working at Walmart and McDonald’s along with the CEOs. But in Massachusetts, at least, 60 percent of government workers have a college degree.

When the numbers are corrected to compare apples to apples, the analysis found, state and local government workers with college diplomas earn 17 percent less than their college-degree equivalents in the private sector. Workers with advanced degrees suffer an even larger wage penalty.

The hardworking staff totally doesn’t care about this issue anymore, but if you splendid readers still do, go nuts.

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Who Is Lori K?

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

Splendid readers:

As the hardworking staff noted earlier, Lori K from Boston stood up to the New York Times paywall naysayers regarding the paper’s new metered system for its Web site.

So can we get a witness to who Lori K is?

Assuming, of course, she’s okay with that.

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NYT Shoutout To ‘Lori K From Boston’

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

The New York Times has finally (see Public Editor Arthur Brisbane’s critique here) gotten around to covering its impending Web site paywall.

Friday Page One:

Times Rolls Out Its Pay Design For Web Users

The New York Times introduced a plan on Thursday to begin charging the most frequent users of its Web site $15 for a four-week subscription in a bet that readers will pay for news they are accustomed to getting free.

Beginning March 28, visitors to NYTimes.com will be able to read 20 articles a month without paying, a limit that company executives said was intended to draw in subscription revenue from the most loyal readers while not driving away the casual visitors who make up the vast majority of the site’s traffic.

Right – soak your best customers while drive-by readers get to freeload.

That’s newsonomics in the digital age.

(For a smart summary of the news world order, check out this Nieman Journalism Lab analysis.)

For a more pedestrian summary, back to the Times:

The Times’s announcement prompted more than 2,500 comments to its Web site.

A reader in Los Angeles wrote, “The price is too high. I just cannot afford it. I will go to BBC.com or cnn.com. Sorry, NYT, you picked the wealthy again.”

That comment prompted Lori K from Boston to respond, “The ‘wealthy?’ It’s two lunches at McDonalds. For a month of reporting. I’m happy to support the NYT for such a low price.”

You rock, Lori.

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Dead Blogging Patti Smith At The MFA (II)

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

Picking up where the hardworking staff left off:

During her thoroughly engaging appearance at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts Wednesday night, Patti Smith read loving excerpts from Just Kids, which chronicled her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the late sixties and seventies, including one excerpt about the July, 1967 day John Coltrane died, “the same summer I met Robert.”

(I was going to call the book Picturing Robert, she said, except it took me so long to write it someone came out with a book called Picturing Hemingway, so I had to change the title. “We stayed together until we knew what we wanted to do in life,” Smith added.)

She also told the story of walking in Times Square in 1969 and seeing a billboard that said, “War Is Over If You Want It. Love, John and Yoko.”

(Yoko Ono runs the same ad in the New York Times virtually every year.)

In addition to singing the praises of walking-around money (“You want something? Get a job. Get some money.”), Smith also sang songs:

• A riveting “Wing” (“Usually I mess it up, even though I writ it.”)

• A haunting Grateful (written after she had a dream in 1995 about the just-deceased Jerry Garcia)

• A soulful My Blakean Year

And then came a reading about the day in 1978 she and Mapplethorpe walked down Bleecker Street in the Village hearing her one Top 20 hit, Because the Night, banging out of every doorway. “Patti,” Robert said, mock-scolding, “you got famous before me.”

And then she launched into a foot-stomping a cappella version of that very tune, which turned into a joyous, soaring singalong.

Because the night belongs to lovers/Because the night belongs to us . . .

Of course, it all belonged to Patti Smith.

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Suddenly Household Appliances Are The New Political Front

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

Forget public-employee collective bargaining rights as the major threat to the Republic. It’s actually household-appliance regulation that will end Life As We Know It.

First there was this piece in the January 31 edition of The Weekly Standard.

Another Triumph for the Greens

To go with toilets that don’t flush and light bulbs that don’t light, we now have dishwashers that don’t wash.

The author, Jonathan V. Last, complained that his “amazing” Bosch SHE58C dishwasher is a washout now that environmentalists have foisted phosphate-free detergents on the dishwashing public.

It so happens that in the last six months, a lot of people have suddenly discovered their dishwashers don’t work as well as they used to. The problem, though, isn’t the dishwashers. It’s the soap. Last July, acceding to pressure from environmentalists, America’s dishwasher detergent manufacturers decided to change their formulas. And the new detergents stink.

As do the dishes, presumably.

If that’s not bad enough, now comes this op-ed in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal:

How Washington Ruined Your Washing Machine

The top-loading washer continues to disappear, thanks to the usual nanny state suspects.

So now my clothes will be as funky as my dinner plates?

‘Fraid so, according to the Journal piece:

It might not have been the most stylish, but for decades the top-loading laundry machine was the most affordable and dependable. Now it’s ruined—and Americans have politics to thank.

In 1996, top-loaders were pretty much the only type of washer around, and they were uniformly high quality. When Consumer Reports tested 18 models, 13 were “excellent” and five were “very good.” By 2007, though, not one was excellent and seven out of 21 were “fair” or “poor.” This month came the death knell: Consumer Reports simply dismissed all conventional top-loaders as “often mediocre or worse.”

The culprit? That’s easy: “[T]he federal government’s obsession with energy efficiency.”

So once again obsession leads to oppression.

Free the Lord and Lady Kenmore Two!

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Dead Blogging Patti Smith At The MFA

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

Patti Smith banged out the house at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Then she brought it down.

Smith delivered the annual Deborah and Martin Hale Visiting Artists Lecture to a packed Remis Auditorium Wednesday night, except it wasn’t so much a lecture as a seminar/songfest.

All the better.

The onetime Princess of Piss, now 64, was everything you’d expect her to be: Offbeat. Engaging. Musical.

And one thing you might not expect her to be: Funny.

Very funny.

Truth to tell, the Missus and I didn’t know all that much about Patti Smith going into the MFA event. But we’d seen Land 250 several years ago at The Fondation Cartier in Paris, which described the exhibit this way:

The Fondation Cartier is hosting a major solo exhibition of the visual work of American artist and  performer Patti Smith. Drawn from pieces created between 1967 and 2007, it strives to provide an insight into her lyrical, spiritual and poetic universe. Her expressive voice serves to magnify the installations created specifically for the exhibition: a synthesis of photographs, drawings and films.

The exhibit was a knockout – a swirl of prose, poetry, photos and film footage.

So we went to the MFA to see Patti Smith in the flesh. She didn’t disappoint.

Smith read from her National Book Award-winning memoir Just Kids, in which “the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies.”

Smith at the MFA:

Art sings of God and ultimately belongs to him.

The goal of the artist is to magnify one’s vision, make one’s vision flesh.

The ultimate goal – do great work.

Fun facts to know and tell about Patti Smith:

1) She’s a coat freak: “At a book signing today, I coveted two people’s coats.”

Namely, a camel hair coat just like Franny’s in Franny and Zooey, and a perfect Goodwill tweed coat.

2) She once shoplifted a copy of  Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations.

Smith also told a great story about Allen Ginsberg buying her a sandwich at Horn & Hardart thinking she was a beautiful boy; talked about always carrying walking-around money since she grown up in pre-credit days; and recalled wanting to replace Johnny Carson as her childhood dream.

And much more, which the hardworking staff will fill in tomorrow.

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Boston City Hall Plaza Redesign, Part Umpteen (II)

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

We’ve gone over this before, yes?

Regardless, here’s another proposal for transforming Boston’s City Hall Plaza, via Wednesday’s Boston Globe:

The transformation of Boston’s City Hall Plaza is supposed to take shape before you even know it’s happening.

Next year, the plaza’s bunker-like subway station will be replaced with a sleek glass structure. Then, trees will start to appear along Cambridge Street and in the plaza itself. Eventually, they will frame a new amphitheater for concerts, theater performances, and special events.

Within 10 years, the nine-acre plaza will scarcely resemble the barren expanse of red brick so many Bostonians have come to detest.

Obligatory pipedream rendering (compliments of HDR and Chan Krieger Sieniewicz Inc.):

Wake me when we get that Boston bike-share program.

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That’s Just So Mean! (Bianca de la Garza Edition)

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Campaign Outsider

Seriously, why do newspapers insist on running gape-mouthed photos of public figures?

Exhibit Bianca, from Wednesday’s Boston Globe Names feature:

That’s just not right.

(This regrettable journalistic practice has gone on for years, but the hardworking staff will dedicate itself to chronicling it in the months ahead. Because that’s how we do.)

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