Monday, December, 25th


Mother Ginger

Clara's dream in the Nutcracker is full of a child's Christmas fantasy - Sugar Plum Fairies, a Mouse King, a Nutcraker Prince. A ginger bread house comes to life.

In his 1816 book The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, E.T.A. Hoffman provided the stuff of dreams and inspiration of the Nutcracker Ballet that is performed around the world.

Urbi et Orbi

The child of Bethlehem directs our gaze towards all children, particularly those who suffer and are abused in the world, the born and the unborn.
-Pope Benedict XVI Christmas sermon 2006


May peace come to children of all the world.

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Sunday, December, 24th


Quiet landscape outside Albuquerque before the big snow storm.

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Friday, December, 15th

Dresden Dolls at Zero


Since listening to a cassette demo years ago, we've had nothing but admiration for the talent and tenacity of singer, songwriter and performance artist Amanda Palmer. Talent because she writes hard hitting songs busting with emotion. Tenacity because she can do it all by herself with a little help from her friends and record label. Not odd, then, to hear Robert Woodruff, Artistic Director at the American Repertory Theatre was inspired enough to invite Amanda and her Dresden Doll cohort Brian Viglione to create a theater piece for the A.R.T.'s new black box space near Harvard Square.

Only days before the recent opening of the Dresden Dolls-A.R.T. collaboration The Onion Cellar, Amanda's interviews with the Boston press and her blog signalled that her experience in what Woodruff terms the "relationship of music and text" was not what she planned.

Inside the theater lobby, a merchandise table sells drink tickets and Dresden Doll ties, t-shirts, souvenir books and $10 posters that read "Lungs Locked, Lips Locked - Join the Rennaissance" and "You Can Stop The Truth From Leaking."

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Friday, December, 8th

Since finding volunteers to help at a .org tradeshow booth some years ago in San Francisco, we've always found craigslist to be very helpful. The plain vanilla community oriented website has grown to be the envy of many a newspaper classified ad sales department. So, it is with great amusement that we read founder Craig Newmark and his Chief Executive Officer Jim Buckmaster not only think outside the box, but show no apparent interest in stepping inside one.

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Wednesday, December, 6th

J.B. Zimmerman revisits the battle in Massachusetts over the state government's initiative to adopt open standards for software, specifically the OpenDocument (ODF) format.

With a new executive government taking the reins at the State House in January, how Massachusetts officials proceed with information technology remains to be seen.

A Technology Advisory Group is advising Governor-elect Patrick. Absent from its list of members that includes a Microsoft employee are any open source community or vendor representatives. Admirably, one IT executive whose company has an existing state contract, reclused himself from the transition working group.

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Wednesday, November, 8th


Massachusetts Democrat Governor-Elect Deval Patrick on Election Night

Democrats held victory parties for their candidates across the U.S. last night. In Massachusetts, 6,000 people gathered at Boston's Hynes Convention Center to celebrate the election of Deval L. Patrick, the second African American governor in U.S. history and the state's first Democrat in that office after sixteen years of Republicans.

Given the shortage of victory celebrations for Democrats in our lifetime, pouring rain or not, this was one Party's party we did not want to miss. Like a blue themed nightclub for the multicultural thousands, there were open bars for VIPs upstairs and cash bars for others downstairs. The standing room only crowd cheered old fashion, but throughly rousting speeches by Senators John Kerry and Ted Kennedy.

Patrick's team ran a positive, grassroots TOGETHER WE CAN campaign in a year of negative ads from the opposition. Help from appearances by national figures Bill Clinton and Barack Obama bolstered his state organization and campaign contributions. Through October 31, his campaign spent approximately $8.4 million. His Republican opponent spent $12.8 million as of the same date.

Patrick was reared by his mother on the southside of Chicago when abandoned by his father, a jazz musician who played jazz with Sun Ra Arkestra. The Governor-Elect remembered his mother at the close of his speech to supporters and press last night:

In an article in mid-January 2005, the Boston Globe first reported that I was considering getting into this race. I visited my ailing mother that evening to show her the headline. She smiled, kissed me and said her last good-bye – and she died a few hours later. We spread her ashes this morning, Election Day, as a way to mark this milestone in our family’s journey, and to honor her lasting presence in our lives.

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Monday, September, 11th

We remember
In the days and weeks that followed 9-11-01, mementos were left by visitors to Ground Zero forming an impromtu memorial to those lost in the attacks.


Roses, a teddy bear, an angel statue, handwritten notes, American flags and a framed picture of a firefighter were just few items on this iron fence photographed in November, 2001 at Trinity Church in lower Manhattan.

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Monday, June, 5th


If you're poor or a minority, your kids are less likely to have time at the school computer and you are less likely to have Net access at home, where real skill-building with technology begins. Just 23 percent of households with annual incomes of less than $15,000 have home Internet access, compared with 90 percent of those with incomes of $75,000 or more, according to government data calculated by The Children's Partnership, a non profit.

- Maggie Jackson reports in the Boston Globe.


In Brasil, a model of digital inclusion for the poor is successfully being provided by public telecenters in urban and rural areas. The South Korean government, through its Ministry of Information and Communication, made South Korea one of the top ranking countries in Internet usage by providing broadband to apartment buildings and financing of home computers.

The United States, which ranks 12th globally in broadband usage, also lags behind in providing any comprehensive plan to include all of its citizens in the information society.

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Friday, April, 14th


Nothing to be done. - Estragon in Waiting for Godot


En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot)



On the occasion of the Beckett centenary, we recall actress Ruth Maleczech, protuding from a large pile of dirt on the stage as Minnie in Beckett's play Happy Days.




Ruth Maleczech as Minnie



Raised and educated in Ireland, Beckett later made his home in Paris. He was fiercely protective of his privacy and the manner in which his work was staged - insisting that it not be deconstructed or reinterpreted, but rather mounted exactly as the stage directions he wrote.




A Young Beckett



RTÉ has produced some Beckett audio that gives us a sense of the man and the volume of work he left.

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Monday, April, 10th


GO WITH THE GLOBE, READ J.J. HUNSECKER - The Eyes of Broadway


EXT. BROADWAY - NIGHT

The southeast corner of the intersection of Broadway and 46th Street, CAMERA, fairly high, shoots north towards the impressive vista of electric signs, silhouetted against the darkening sky. Very heavy traffic and crowded sidewalks. CAMERA descends towards the Orange Juice stand on the corner, passing the booth which sells souvenir hats. It moves through the congestion of chattering passersby, steadily approaching a smartly dressed young man, who stands at the counter of the Orange Juice stand. Oblivious of the hub-bub around him, SIDNEY FALCO is concerned only with his private problems.

He turns as a newspaper truck pulls up at the curb behind him; this is what he has been waiting for...

So begins the Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman screenplay, Sweet Smell of Success, the 1957 film which is brought to mind by recent stories about a widely read New York gossip column Page Six.

CLOSER ANGLE - NIGHT

The news truck delivery man tosses a bundle out onto the sidewalk besides a newsstand.

DETAIL

The bundle of newspapers. It hits the sidewalk with a smack. CAMERA PULLS BACK as Sidney Falco crosses the sidewalk. The owner of the newsstand, IGGY, comes to pick up the bundle; he is a grizzled gnome with a philosophical sense of humor; Sidney snaps his fingers with impatience. Iggy wears spectacles and is clearly more or less blind, he has to grope for the cord that binds the papers.


IGGY
Aw Lady, if I looked like you, I'd--

SIDNEY
C'mon...C'mon...

IGGY
(recognizing Sidney's voice)
Keep ya sweatshirt on, Sidney.


Majestically taking his time, Iggy lifts the bundle to his stand and cuts the cord.


IGGY
Hey, Fresh, the Globe just came in -- Hey, Sidney, want an item for Hunsecker's column? Two rolls get fresh with a baker! Hey, hot, hot, hot -- etc.




In Sweet Smell of Success, Burt Lancaster plays J.J. Hunsecker, a powerful New York columnist roughly based on Walter Winchell. Tony Curtis plays the role of Sidney Falco, the ambitious, pretty boy press agent who will stop at nothing to find ink for his showbiz clients in JJ's tabloid column .


Sidney and J.J. at Twenty One Club

Life Imitates Art
In what is playing out like a real life sequel, the attorney for a former supermarket bagboy self-made billionaire, whose friends include a President and a movie star's supermodel ex-girlfriend, goes to the FBI and launches an investigation of a gossip column stringer for the New York Post's Page Six. The story was first broken by the Post's competitor tabloid the New York Daily News.


George Plimpton, Jared Paul Stern, and Cameron Richardson at Elaine's on Manhattan's Upper Eastside (Larry Flint photo, 1996)


"Match me, Sidney"


In the movie, a newspaper columnist Leo Bartha, threatened with blackmail for philandering, tells Sidney what he thinks of him and J.J.

BARTHA
Your friend Hunsecker - you tell him for me - he's a disgrace to his profession. Never mind about my, my bilious private life. I run a decent, responsible column. That's the way it stays. Your man prints anything. He'll use any spice to pepper up his daily garbage. You tell him I said so. Tell him that like yourself, he's got the scruples of a guinea pig and the morals of a gangster.

SIDNEY
(sneering) What do I do now? Whistle 'Stars and Stripes Forever'?

The business of gossip
Campbell Robertson writes about the gossip game that plays upon people in nightclubs, restaurants and their big houses.

Might Nikki Finke, Los Angeles journalist and bane of high profile movie industry executives write her own screenplay on the unfolding story?




Call it prep-punk if you will, wear it if you dare, and remember: Admit Nothing. Blame Everyone. Be Bitter. And Look Fabulous.

- Skull & Bones by Jared Paul Stern

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Tuesday, April, 4th

No hoopla, just a quiet milestone

Five years ago, MIT announced an initiative to make free course materials available online through its OpenCourseWare project.

Congratulations to Professors Harold Abelson, Steven R. Lerman, Dick K. P. Yue and the many members of the MIT community who have worked to make their knowledge base accessible from around the digital globe.

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