Churbuck.com

I just returned from five days in New Orleans — my first visit to the city — and wanted to share some random experiences and photos from a very condensed and exhausting introduction to one of the coolest places I’ve been anywhere. Period.

I stayed with my wife in the French Quarter in a nice three-star hotel on Royal Street — the Andrew Jackson. Immediately upon arriving she dragged me out into the Vieux Carre (it being her second visit) and introduced me the Cafe du Monde for chicory coffee and beignets covered with powdered sugar, so covered with powdered sugar that I left the place looking like Tony Montana. Then to Antoine’s Hermes Bar for a Sazerac (rye whiskey, sugar, Peychaud bitters chilled in a glass rinsed with Herbsaint and garnished with a twist), Arnaud’s for gumbo, shrimp and grits, and a table-side serenade of “I Only Have Eyes For You” by a banjo, trumpet and bass trio who talked about playing My Father’s Moustache on Cape Cod and the late Dave McKenna of Yarmouth, arguably the peninsula’s most famous jazz musician.

Then down Bourbon Street and its crazed chaos of Giant Ass Beers, Larry Flynt’s Underaged Strippers, the cloying miasma of upchucked stomach contents, and a louche doorman who told me, as I walked hand-in-hand with my wife of 30 years that he could show me “Lots of Ho’s in No Clothes”

That was night one.

Day two — more beignets and coffee and then a cab ride out to the Garden District and Commander’s Palace, the foodie mecca that lists Emeril Lagasse and Paul Prudhomme among its ranks of alumni chefs. I cannot argue with $0.25 lunch time martinis (and a perfectly made Ramos Fizz, the drink that always eluded me as a bartender), and some of the most exquisite cooking I’ve ever tasted. A poky, langorous street car ride back down St. Charles to the city center, a walk back through the French Quarter, teeming with pre-St. Patrick’s day revelers, then a brief rest before an evening at the Rock N’Bowl — a combination bowling alley/hamburger joint/bar/music venue off of Carrolton Avenue where we saw (or is it “heard?)  Bonearama, a wild jazz-funk bank fronted by three trombone players who killed the best cover of the Beatles’ Hey Bulldog I’ve ever heard.

Day Three was mostly spent on the banks of the Mississippi, sitting on a park bench watching the barges and tankers and jazz boats go by while eating a muffaletta from Central Grocery and washing it down with a Barq’s and a bag of Zapp’s potato chips.  Bluebird skies, clement breezes and the amazing spectacle of humanity that marched before us on the riverside Moon Walk (named after former New Orleans mayor “Moon” Landrieu). Between the bells of the St. Louis cathedral (the oldest continuous church in the USA), the cartoonish sounding calliope on the decks of the sternwheeler Natchez, and snatches of buskers’ music floating over the levee from Jackson Square came the sound of a Second Line, that wonderful New Orleans tradition of a brass band marching along, followed by a dancing and jiving mob of umbrella-pumping, hanky-waving fans. As it got louder and crossed the street car tracks, it became apparent it would proceed down the promenade past our bench. This is what we saw:

I managed to completely fry my face sitting in the sun all day, and spent the rest of the trip looking like a suppurating lemur with bright red cheeks and forehead and pale Cape Cod white eyes. That didn’t deter me from doing my best to damage my liver and fail my pending cholesterol test with too many Abita Ambers and boatloads of steamed shrimp.

Sunday, St. Patrick’s Day, I attended the 9 am Mass at St. Louis cathedral in an attempt to revive my somewhat moribund “52 Churches” project of 2008-09.  Other than looking like I was suffering from an incipient case of lupus, with my blistered cheeks and nose, I sat through the service marking the fifth Sunday in Lent, listened to the deacon’s reading and interpretation of the story of Lazarus, and as always, slipped out the back  during Communion due to the first rule of 52 Churches which is not to participate in any rites or reading foreign to my non-denominational, ecumenical, atheistic beliefs. Nice church, packed with tourists and locals, again the oldest continuously used church in the country, declared a “minor basilica” by the Pope during his visit in 1987. At night, from Bourbon street, an immense shadow of Christ is projected onto the back of the nave by a spotlight silhouetting a statue of Jesus, arms outstretched. The incongruity of sinner/saint is, I suppose, quintessentially New Orleans.

Later that morning we headed out to Central City and the A.L. Davis Park for Super Sunday — the annual gathering of the Mardi Gras Indians on the Sunday nearest St. Joseph’s Day. This was mind blowing to say the least. As a fan of the HBO series Treme, I’ve been fascinated by the Indian culture through the great portrayal of a “tribal Chief” by Clarke Peters as Big Chief Lambreaux. Sunday I got to experience about twenty of the tribes as they marched with their contingent of be-feathered warriors around the streets of the Central City.

Indians were followed by Po’ Boys at the Parkway Bakery and Tavern. I did my level best to kill myself with a large “surf & turf” which combined roast beef and gravy with fried shrimp. This was frightening and will drive all pentinence post-trip.

St. Patrick’s Day in New Orleans puts St. Patrick’s Day in Boston to shame. The city has a big Irish immigrant population, but the degree to which a holiday centered around alcohol is taken by Bourbon Street is beyond crazy. From bodypainted 60-year old ladies to frat boys shouting at their shoes on the side streets, it was a scene out of out of some demented painting of post-apocalyptic hell. So we took refuge in the oh-so-classy French 75 bar, and wheezed back a couple Sazeracs before calling it a night.

All in all, an amazing place that I had to experience to get beyond the usual cliches of mardi gras beads, masks, and gumbo.

The Barnstable Conservation Commission will return to the application by Massachusetts Audubon and Three Bays Preservation to dredge 800 feet off of the west end of Sampson’s tonight at the hearing room at town hall beginning at 6:30 pm.

I’ve heard some interesting rumors about the project over the past few weeks, so tonight’s meeting is probably going to be as lively as the last one was in terms of participation by foes and proponents. I’m planning on attending and may speak my mind on the project. I’ll post any remarks if I make them.

To that end I’ve been asked to post the following statements from a proponent and opponent to the project:

In favor is Andrew “Oggie” Pesek,  an officer of Three Bays and director of the Wianno Yacht Club, who forwarded this letter asking the membership of the Wianno Yacht Club in Osterville  for their support for the project. (disclosure: my family were briefly members of the WYC in the 1970s): DNSI_WYC_Letter

Opposed is Brad Wheelwright, a Cotuit resident, member of the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club (more disclosure, I am a lifelong member of the CMYC and former president of its association), and ace Cotuit Skiff racer. Brad sent the following:

“I am writing to express my views on the proposed Sampson’s Island dredging project.

I am strongly opposed to the project, mainly because I’m convinced that it would constitute inappropriate use of public funds and resources. An undertaking of this magnitude and expense should be easily justified from every perspective, not widely controversial and based upon questionable assumptions, as this proposal is proving to be.

However, even if dislodging, moving, and placing 11 acres of land wasn’t going to cost a great deal of money and require great quantities of labor, fuel, and machinery, I would still be firmly opposed to this project. First of all, moving that much sediment will cause dirty, disrupted water conditions for quite some time, undoubtedly harming the ecosystem of Cotuit Bay and West Bay. Shellfishing is a longstanding source of recreation, subsistence, and commerce for the residents of the count and should not be compromised without clear justification.

Secondly, I do not think there is a valid boating safety concern, as some proponents have indicated. I use those waters frequently and there is plenty of room for safe navigation as the geography stands. I believe my point of view on this matter is supported by a lack of any alarming history of accidents at the site. In fact the only fatality (or injury, for that matter) that I know of occurred nearly thirty years ago, when the distance from Reilly’s Beach to Sampson’s Island was much greater.

In addition, careful study (conducted by those in the hire of the project’s proponents) has demonstrated that widening the entrance will not in any significant way increase the Bay system’s tidal flushing or lead to cleaner water in the more inland connected waterways. The root of that problem clearly lies with septic inputs and fertilizer pressure, and it is of some concern to me that members of the public seem not to know how thoroughly the coastal engineering studies prove that dredging will not begin to address the issue.
The part of Sampson’s Island that is proposed to be removed is a heavily used recreational resource. Crowding is already a problem, and the destruction of many hundreds of yards of beach will only compound it (and perhaps also lead to unanticipated and unwelcome water safety concerns).

While it has been pointed out that several vacation houses on Grand Island and the navigability of the Seapuit River are at risk without the addition of sediment at the eastern end of Dead Neck, I do not think this justifies the proposed dredging project. Neither protection for the private residences or the easy availability of a Seapuit channel are publicly necessary; private funding could and should secure the former, and there are two very reliable alternative water routes between West Bay and Cotuit Bay, one of which is entirely protected.

Finally, I would like to bring attention to the worst case scenario associated with such intensive dredging of a protective barrier island. Typically, the failure of a coastal engineering project is marked by a return to the status quo (witness the Rushy Marsh Pond debacle). However, the dynamics of a bay entrance are beyond complex, and I believe there is potential for catastrophe here that very few people have considered. It is possible that this project could lead to dramatic, unanticipated changes to the area. Bluff Point, without protection, could be destroyed. The Cotuit entrance channel could become too shallow for conventional navigation. The balance that has allowed for a viable Bay entrance could be upset beyond all hope of repair.

Why do I think this could happen? Strikingly, the sea level has risen approximately four inches in the last sixty years, and according to some science, may rise twelve inches or more in the next sixty. There is reason to think that coastal storms will become stronger and more frequent. In so many ways, our climate is not the climate of the mid 20th century.

Some proponents believe that because the dredging will return the outline of Sampson’s to a former state, it is inherently a good thing. First of all, with the sea level four inches higher, and a catastrophic worst-case scenario accordingly possible, there is absolutely no reason to think that such an outline is sustainable now. Furthermore, this argument represents a flawed method of consideration; the historical proportions of Cotuit Bay once included a shipping channel where Cupid’s Cove now exists. Should we engineer THIS alteration, simply because it once was? (It’s really no more outlandish than the present proposal, in terms of scope and the amount of sediment that would need to be moved.)

Finally, I would like to point out that Three Bays Preservation has continually implied that dredging projects in the system improve water quality significantly, something that is not backed up by any of the data. Just as one example, their website mentions improvement and prospects for improvement, but on the very same website one can find evidence that eel grass existed within the three bays in 1995 but not in 2002, a timeframe that spans their first two dredging projects. Furthermore, the anticipated improvement in water quality (as estimated by their own engineers) is minimal enough that it doesn’t even appear within proposal documents as part of the list of expected benefits.”

I am “cautiously” in favor of the project with some modifications. I’ll post my points for and against later.

Cape Cod has a unique geological feature known as a “Pamet.” Like archipelago, peninsula, tombolo or isthmus, a pamet is a specific geological landform, in the case of Cape Cod, one defined as a dry stream valley on a glacial outwash plain.

The term was first coined in 1934 by Woodworth and Wigglesworth as a “long depression in a thick deposit of stratified gravel and sand … resembles a valley formed by running water but its sides and bottom has the forms of mounds and hollows produced by irregularities in the deposition of glacial drift, either ice-laid or water-laid.”

The word “pamet” is derived from the name of a Wampanoag tribe that lived in present-day Truro near the northernmost extremity of Cape Cod along the Pamet River, a beautiful valley that bisects the finger-like extremity from east-to-west, spanning Cape Cod Bay near the site of Corn Hill (where the Pilgrims discovered, and plundered, a cache of corn buried in the sand in baskets by the Pamets) eastwards to Ballston Beach on the Atlantic Ocean.

There are other pamets on the Cape, particularly in East Falmouth — visible from Route 28 between Waquoit and Teaticket — marked by streams such as the Coonamesset, Quashnet, and Mashpee Rivers and in some cases, developed in the 19th century into cranberry bogs which rely on the fresh water streams for irrigation.

 On Friday of the past week, during the most recent northeaster of this terrible winter of 2013, the storm surge and relentless surf punched through the dunes at Ballston Beach and poured into the Pamet River, making North Truro and Provincetown technically an island unto themselves.

Here, courtesy of the Cape Cod Times’ CapeCast (hosted by the inimitable Eric Williams) is some great video showing nature in her full fury:

 

Bob Page emailed me a link to this Harvard Business Review blog post about how advertisers need to act more like newsrooms.

Written by Newsweek/Daily Beast CEO Baba Shetty and Wharton Professor Jerry Wind, the post cites some marketing trends where companies are:

• Advertising in real time by tweeting or pushing out content in response to events or public feedback. Examples would include Old Spice’s successful YouTube “Smell Like a Man, Man” project where 200 short videos were shot in response to social media interaction; and brand’s tweeting opportunistic messages during the Super Bowl blackout
• Creating advertorial media and content factories on their own or  in partnership with media brands: they cite Intel and Vice’s Creator’s Project and the Redbull Media House
• Becoming more agile. Instead of planning advertising campaigns around 30-second television and meticulously planned media buys, the modern marketer is more reactive and opportunistic.

Nice sentiments, but in my experience, the reality of putting such sentiments into action is a lot more frustrating. Getting big organizations to be faster and more open is always going to be an exercise in frustration and patience. Bob wrote: “This “marketers as newsrooms” stuff from Intel, Red Bull, Liberty Mutual looks an awful lot like the kind of team you got started at Lenovo.”

I’ll take the compliment for trying to push the company to be more agile on its communications and media, but the frustrations occurred when two traditional conservative corporate communications edicts were invoked: risk and quality.

Risk is what a corporate communications department is designed to minimize. They plan the message, craft it, practice it, push it across the organization and limit the points where the media can engage. Rank and file employees can’t, and shouldn’t, talk to the press or randomly respond to social media. Even the CEO is given a speech written for him, carefully crafted down to every ad hoc joke and quip. External PR agencies and internal staff work together across product introductions, corporate messaging and investor relations, focused on cutting down the risk of leaks, illegal financial disclosure and embarrassing moments.

Risk aversion in corporate communications means slowing things down, stone walling, taking time to consider responses and reactions before blurting out something that isn’t signed off. This doesn’t work when a lynch party is forming over Christmas shipping delays and the CEO’s home phone number is being shared along with form letters for submission to the Better Business Bureau. The realities of modern crisis communications is that minutes, not hours, are crucial, and when a customer service team needs to wait 24 hours for corporate communications to reply with a sanitized, bland statement opportunities are lost and tempers inflamed.

Quality is what gets invoked when a digital marketing team tries to get a video onto the company’s YouTube channel.  Suddenly the brand team and the advertising creative people turn into critics, and cry foul when a cell-phone video of an engineer explaining how he revved up boot times for a new PC is put out there on the same day of a product announcement claiming the new laptops are faster to start up than the competitions. The official announcement may make the claim, but the customers want to know how and why, so pointing a video camera at the engineer and putting up a 60 second answer suddenly makes the purists invoke HD quality standards.

Here’s a video I challenged the team to shoot and post in a single day when I felt a product announcement lacked any substance or answers. This bummed some people out because of its low quality, but 80,000 views later, I’d declare it a success. It simply Kevin Beck interview Howard Locker on what he did to rev up boot times.

I maintain that if you’re in a complex business and have opened the doors to questions through corporate blogs, customer service forums, Facebook pages, etc.. you better be prepared to get something up in a matter of hours, not days.

One thing will never change and that is that corporate content is ultimately advertorial and as such, inferior to independently/  objectively produced journalism.

I’m going to take credit for coining the term “corporate journalism” back in 2000 when I was at McKinsey working on the  firm’s knowledge management system. My friend and colleague Rob O’Regan and I realized our purpose in life was to leverage our experience as business and technology reporters in prying out of taciturn consultants conditioned to maintain client confidentiality some meaningful insights that could be developed into “content” for the benefit of other consultants and their clients.

The act of interviewing — not media training where a PR person coaches a senior executive on how to spin a story — but actually probing an expert in the reporter’s equivalent of the Socratic method, produced some strong results: it forced the experts to clarify their jargon, realize when their points were obtuse, and understand what they considered interesting or important wasn’t necessarily so. But the public result of this process — a story in the McKinsey Quarterly, or a video series for client development — is still content with an inherent proprietary bias.

Yes, brands need to be more agile, corporate communications needs to be faster and more authentic, and old strictures of spinning messages and planning ad campaigns deserve to die.  But beware of flaks bearing the next new thing, it usually turns out to be unbearably bogus and contrived and designed to serve the best interests of the organization and its shareholders, not the public and its customers.

Just a reminder the Conservation Commission will continue its hearing on the application of Mass Audubon and Three Bays Preservation to dredge off the western end of Sampson’s Island to restore the beach at the eastern, Osterville end.

The hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, March 19th and begins at 6:30 pm.

One of the most influential books in my youth was Sterling Hayden’s autobiography: Wanderer.  For a young writer restless to get out of the confines of college and into the “real” world, his life’s story was an inspiration of boot-strapped pluck, luck, and determination to find some meaning on the deep blue sea. That he was a leading man during Hollywood’s Golden Era, married to starlets, called before the Communist witch-hunts of the House Un-American Committee, then revived in  the 60s and 70s as an actor’s actor in Dr. Strangelove and the Godfather was mere trim and icing on a life spent before the mast on a Gloucester fishing schooner and tall ships. Sterling Hayden was the real deal, a manly man who deserves a revival.

Hayden wrote two books: Wanderer is still in print and a very worthwhile read. His one and only novel, Voyage: A Novel of 1896 is out of print, but worth tracking down from a used bookstore. It is one of the better maritime novels on my bookshelf. As for his films, other than Strangelove and Godfather, his other big contemporary film was The Long Goodbye. His early stuff — beginning in 1941 after he was discovered by Hollywood on the deck of a Gloucester schooner because of some newsreel footage shot at the annual schooner races in Boston — is pretty obscure, B-movie stuff. He hated the studio system which cast him as a pretty boy/beefcake but he put up with it to finance his expensive tastes in wives and boats. Hayden was a self-admitted bad actor.

He spent World War II in the OSS, working behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia with Marshal Tito’s band of resistance guerrillas fighting Nazis. That built some admiration for the Communists which got him into hot water after the war during the Hollywood witch hunts, a period in his life he long regretted after he uncharacteristically named names.

I met him once, in Sausalito, California in the early 80s, shortly before his death in 1986, when I was tending bar in San Francisco and writing as the Bay Area stringer for Soundings, a weekly boating newspaper. I read a profile of his first mate, Spike Africa, in the San Francisco Chronicle, learned Hayden was in Sausalito and tracked him down. I was 22 and the two interviews I had with him were my first experience with true hero worship. I never wrote the profile, the editors at Sounding weren’t interested and I was too flaky to freelance the piece elsewhere, a mistake I kick myself for.

There is a great appreciation of Hayden, the sailor and writer, by Captain Paul Watson at Sea Shepherd International’s blog. I’ll borrow his quote of Hayden’s because it was the kind of sentiment that fired me up as a confused and rudderless young sophmore:

“To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen who play with their boats at sea… cruising, it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about. I’ve always wanted to sail to the south seas, but I can’t afford it.” What these men can’t afford is not to go. They are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of security. And in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine – and before we know it our lives are gone. What does a man need – really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in – and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all – in the material sense, and we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention for the sheer idiocy of the charade. The years thunder by, The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed. Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?”

- Sterling Hayden

The annual herring census conducted at the Marstons Mills run at the intersection of Routes 149 and 28 will be discussed Saturday, March 16 at a meeting   at Liberty Hall in Marstons Mills from 3 to 5 pm. I can’t make it, but I hope to volunteer my time to the cause.

The herring project has a blog with more information and contact info.

The fish generally arrive in mid-April (I always associate them with school vacation and Tax Day) and continue into early May. The population has crashed in recent years (theories abound as to why) but the taking of herring has been banned by the state (as well as Rhode Island and Connecticut) for the past several years to the dismay of striper fishermen who love to live line for the first run of spring bass. The first scouts should be reported in a couple weeks at the Middleboro  and Aquinnah runs which seem to see them arrive first.

A good source of information about the alewive and blueback herring project (as well as the moratorium on their taking) can be found at the state Division of Marine Fisheries’ website.

Like most civic minded voting citizens I’m  keeping an eye on Washington and the partisan stalemate in Congress, shaking my head and generally feeling feh about the dysfunctional state of affairs.

Today, on the eve of the Sequester, I want to recommend an interesting parable from past Congressional history as described by two excellent writers, the late historian (and personal favorite) Barbara Tuchman, and James Grant, the editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer. Tuchman introduced me to Thomas Reed in her book, Proud Tower, which sent me looking for more information about the man and that quest led me to Grant’s biography of Reed, Mister Speaker.

Thomas B. Reed was a congressman from Maine who was Speaker of the House from 1889 t0 1899. He was a brilliant attorney and master parlimentarian who had an immense effect on reforming the procedural rules of the House of Representatives and broke an impasse similar to the one we see today. He most significant achievement was ending an obstructionist tactic used by the minority party (Reed was a Republican confronted with a bumptious Democrat minority) called the “disappearing quorum” — something analogous to the abuse of the filibuster in the current Congress (which according to NPR has not passed a major law in over 900 days).

According to Wikipedia: “Reed sought to circumscribe the ability of the minority party to block business by way of its members refusing to answer a quorum call — which, under the rules, prevented a member from being counted as present even if they were physically in the chamber — thus forcing the House to suspend business. This is popularly called the disappearing quorum. ”

When I think of filibuster I think of a brave congressman standing on his feet reading recipes into the Congressional Record, refusing to cede the floor to anyone. Jimmy Stewart in “Mister Smith Goes to Washington” is the image in most of our minds when we think filibuster.

The record in real life for a filibuster was set by Senator Strom Thurmond in 1957 to block the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Thurmond held the floor for 24 hours and 18 minutes non-stop. I have no idea how he handled his biological needs, but the man managed to hang in there for 24 hours non-stop.

Listening to former Senator TomDaschle on NPR during my drive to New York on Tuesday, he made the strong point that the minority use of the filibuster has gotten out of control and that he’d like to see a return to the days when real dissenters stood up and actually suffered for their conscience. “I’d like to see somebody break Thurmond’s record,” he said.

What is needed is a new Thomas Reed to come in and lay down the law. Here, according to Wikipedia, is how Reed imposed what have come to be known as the “Reed Rules” and transformed Congress in the process:

“Reed’s solution was enacted on January 28, 1890, in what has popularly been called the “Battle of the Reed Rules”.^[3] This came about when Democrats attempted to block the inclusion of a newly elected Republican from West Virginia, Charles Brooks Smith.^[4] The motion to seat him passed by a tally of 162–1; however, at the time a quorum consisted of 165 votes, and when voting closed Democrats shouted “No quorum,” triggering a formal House quorum count. Speaker Reed began the roll call; when members who were present in the chamber refused to answer, Reed directed the Clerk to count them as present anyway.^[5] Startled Democrats protested heatedly, issuing screams, threats, and insults at the Speaker. James B. McCreary, a Democrat fromKentucky, challenged Reed’s authority to count him as present; Reed replied, “The Chair is making a statement of fact that the gentleman from Kentucky is present. Does he deny it?”^[5]

“Unable to deny their presence in the chamber, Democrats then tried to flee the chamber or hide under their desks, but Reed ordered the doors locked. (Texas Representative “Buck” Kilgore was able to flee by kicking his way through a door.) ^[6] Trapped, the Democrats tried to hide under their desks and chairs; Reed marked them present anyway.

“The conflict over parliamentary procedure lasted three days, with Democrats delaying consideration of the bill by introducing points of order to challenge the maneuver, then appealing the Reed’s rulings to the floor. Democrats finally dropped their objections on January 31, and Smith was seated on February 3 by a vote of 166–0. Six days later, with Smith seated, Reed won a vote on his new “Reed Rules,” eliminating the disappearing quorum and lowering the quorum to 100 members. Though Democrats reinstated the disappearing quorum when they took control of the House the following year, Reed as minority leader proved so adroit at using the tactic against them that Democrats reinstated Reed Rules in 1894.^[7]“

My wife is an interior designer and has been running her own firm for the past 13 years, serving clients on Cape Cod and elsewhere with the usual technical headaches any small business owner endures. She’ll be the first to exclaim how technology has improved her life — she’s especially fond of her Apple holy-trinity of iPhone, iPad and Mac — and the ease with with she can research her suppliers’ catalogues, pull together proposals, collect photographs and share them across devices.

But her website has always been a sore point, a thing crucial to her business but a completely off-limits creature that mere mortals were not allowed to touch.

I was her webmaster — in the 1990s sense of that word — and I suck.

I am completely unqualified and unequipped to take the design vision of a very talented designer and translate that into an online presence. I may know what looks good, but I don’t know how to make things look good. I don’t know cascading style sheets, PHP, Flash, Dreamweaver, HTML 5 …. but I can do the following basic steps, basic enough to long ago build the first prototype of Forbes.com, launch this blog, and limp along with the help of my friends:

1. Register a domain name
2. Open a hosting account
3. Log into the account with an FTP client
4. Build a web page with words and pictures
5. Make a link to another web page
6. Upload the pages from my PC to the host using the FTP client
7. Use cPanel to administer the account, set up MySQL databases, add email addresses
8. Make a “favicon” for the website
9. Meta-tag the website
10. Get bitched at for not updating the website

Earlier this week, in a fit of passionate love for the mother of my children, I decided to hand over the keys to her domain to her and put her in charge. This is a woman who can make Photoshop sing, can do page layouts, draw detailed blueprints, and direct professional photographers like no one else I know, and I’ve known a lot of designers over the years. But she doesn’t want to hear about FTP clients, know about the “public html” folder, or whether “home pages” need to be named “home.htm” or “home.html”

She just wants a good looking website that she can manage.

A couple weeks ago I told her to use some downtime and get familiar with WordPress by opening up a free WordPress.com account. This she did.  I told her to check out the themes that were available and find one she liked. She did, settling on a commercial theme used by professional photographers to display and sell their work: Photocrati.

Yesterday I called her ISP, figured out the administrator’s password, and FTP’d in to make a copy of the website I built by hand in 2000 (yes, it was WAY past its expiration date). I downloaded, unzipped and then uploaded  the latest version of WordPress, (the pretty amazing blog/content management system that powers this blog), set up a new database, re-read the magic five-minute WordPress installation instructions, and ta-da (or “wah-lah” as an illiterate colleague once wrote in a document I was asked to proofread), a new era was dawning.

Here’s the point of all this: she was able to get a layout, template, functionality and tool kit for under $100. A perfectly nice, crisp, well-designed site with far more options and future functionality than she will ever need (she could even accept PayPal through her site although she doesn’t sell anything online), installed and handed over to her with no manual or weeks of night-school training to operate. She just wanted a very basic, minimalist site that consists of a home page, an about page, contact information, and a lot of photographic portfolios of her work. In the end she needed a series of photo galleries that she could manage without turning to a geek like me with other things to do.

Ten years ago this would have involved finding a “web designer,”  communicating the desired requirements and vision, reviewing mock-ups, revising those mock-ups, but mostly waiting for the designer/web builder to publish it all. The notion of giving a “lay-person” direct control over the content management system would never have been imagined unless she was publishing a Geocities page or limping along with Microsoft FrontPage.

I am more convinced than ever that the triumph of Automattic, the commercial parent of the open sourced WordPress, is a triumph over complexity, over licenses and claims of “you wouldn’t understand.”  This experience makes me glad I’m not running a content management software or web design company. The marketplace for good design is greater than ever, and the ability for a talented coder and designer like Photocrati to create a great template and sell it as an enhancement to a great platform like WordPress is one of the more profound transformations of digital marketing for small businesses that  I have seen.

I loved Mike Judge’s “Idiocracy,” his 2006 movie about an ordinary guy who through an accident of suspended animation wakes up in a future where people have devolved to a state of utter idiocy and he is the smartest one by default. I realized yesterday, as the social networks started trending with the news that Google is looking for a select group to test drive their Glasses, that we are one step closer to Judge’s satirical hellish vision that began on that day sometime in the 1980s when the first moron started shouting “Can You Hear Me NOW?!?” on a city sidewalk and I walked past pitying the poor schizophrenic having an argument with himself.

Wearable technology make it difficult to tell the mentally ill from the sane and never make a good fashion statement (see cell phone belt holsters).  ”Yuppy-with-cellphone” is Hollywood’s shorthand for “asshole” but was replaced by “Jerk with Bluetooth Headset.”  To be really ironic one only need put a first generation bag phone or one of those ginormous walkie-talkie phones on a character, and let the laughter begin. I can’t navigate a mall parking lot without nearly being clipped by some Mouth Breather with a phone in one hand and the controls of a two-ton SUV in the other. Public displays of communication devices is a serious sign of poor etiquette, bad manners, callous indifference and materialistic bad taste that says “Look At Me, I have the Latest Jesus Phone 2.0 5G LTE”

For more d-bags with phones, visit randomahole.com

This is not news but it’s about to get a lot worse.

So back to Google Glasses.  They are a pretty simple concept, cooler perhaps than the old Dick Tracy wrist phone it turns out we didn’t need along with flying cars and jet packs. If you think it’s weird running into the back of some Millenial/Net Gen texter who suddenly stops right in the middle of the sidewalk in front of Radio City Music Hall at the peak of the evening rush hour, blocking the entrance to the 48th Street Subway, just so she can thumb out an “OMG”, then just wait until the sidewalks masses start talking to their Glasses. At least they won’t have to stop walking or risk being blown out of their Sketchers by a crosstown bus.

Start by accepting voice recognition doesn’t really work. It’s getting better, sure, and I’ll concede it is very nice to hit the microphone icon on my phone when it is acting as a GPS and tell it slowly and patiently like a toddler that I want to go to a specific address. The old method of trying to type the address while driving was far worse. But honestly, is Siri really that amazing? Do you actually use it or know someone who does? Did Dragon Naturally speaking suddenly lift millions from the tyranny of typing so now they can dictate and control their PCs with a microphone?

Second, Google Glasses needs a connection to the Internet in order to do what it does. “Well duh!” you may say, but consider how it’s going to get that signal by making a bluetooth connection to your phone, which is in your pocket, and then either a WiFi connection when you’re near a hot spot or a 3G/4G mobile data connection to America’s shameful and sclerotic wireless broadband network. So, to review, what Glasses does is combine: a) the weirdness of public displays of talking to one’s self, with ; b) the douche bag fashion statement that a bluetooth headset in one’s ear makes, with ;c) the moronic futility of talking to an inanimate object with d) slow, crappy networks.

I’ll concede it might be great while driving, sort of like some fighter jet’s HUD with all sorts of useful stuff sort of painted over the real world (“He’s up my Six Maverick!”) and I can see the Xtreme Sports Crowd give up their GoPro helmet cameras to narcissistically share a vertiginous attempt to injure their crotches just like the stars in Idiocracy’s  top television game show, “Ow, My Balls”  – but to walk into a dive bar and order a beer and then say out loud, over the din: “Take a Picture and Tweet It” is going to mark one as the paste-easter (played by Don Knotts) who ordered sarsaparilla before being called out and gunned down on the streets of Laredo by Blacky (played by Robert Mitchum) who is going to squirt a stream of tobacco spit all over the pencil neck’s corpse. That’s just the early adopters, and as Alexis Madrigal hysterically writes in The Atlantic, there have already been early adopter sightings in the dive bars of the Mission in San Francisco. Madrigal’s piece begins when a bar owner posts on Facebook:

“Last night around 9:45 two people walked into the bar. Looked me square in the eye, and acting as if everything was normal they ordered beers.. Oh did I mention they were wearing Google Glasses! In public! In A BAR!”

I used to wear glasses. I started in 7th Grade. I never liked wearing glasses. They rubbed holes in the bridge of my nose, got smudged and dirty, and were bad to play sports in. I was a geek. Then I got contact lenses and I was still a geek, just a little less obvious. I wore glasses until my mid-40s when a combination of very early cataracts and then a freaky detached retina basically made it impossible for me to wear glasses again (I could, however, wear a monocle). Now it looks pretty inevitable that at some point in the next five years I am going to get one of these things and stick it on my face, and open my mouth and say, “Google. Take a Picture.”

And I’ll be one step closer to the Idiocracy.

I read with interest the news reports of the massive erosion to Sandwich’s beaches following the blizzard that hit that northside coast head on with 70 mph winds and big storm surge inflated seas two weeks ago. What I was unaware of was the simmering resentment by the town over the big pair of jetties that guard the entrance to the Cape Cod Canal, jetties built at the turn of the century when the canal was completed, put there by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the entrance open and flowing.

I mention this only because of the widely held belief here in Cotuit that the Wianno Cut and its two jetties are responsible for the present situation where Dead Neck is starved of sand from its eastern end by the jetties, a situation the owners of the island — 3 Bays and Mass Audubon — believe can only be temporarily relieved by dredging sand from the growing western, Cotuit-end of the island and piping it back to the eroded section. As I’ve written before here, the littoral drift of sand is not a straight-forward, perpendicular dynamic where waves push and pull sand in and out of a beach, but where sand flows along the beach, driven by the prevailing winds and currents. A jetty interrupts that flow, backing up sand “upstream” while starving everything “downstream.

The situation in Sandwich is deplorable enough that the town is telling the Feds to fix it since the Canal and its jetties are Federal property. Not so with the Wianno Cut, where I believe the cut was sponsored and paid for by the town (initially with a wooden, planked jetty) at the urging of the people of Osterville who wanted easy access to Nantucket Sound.

Quoting the Cape Cod Times (paywall in effect):

“A big frustration for some is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Town officials believe a source of the erosion problem is the Cape Cod Canal, which is controlled by the Corps. A jetty system built in the early 1900s to keep sediment from building up in the canal is starving the beach of sand needed to replenish the dune system.

“The end result: Scusset Beach has too much sand and the coastline from Town Neck to Spring Hill doesn’t have enough, Selectman James Pierce said.

“I agree with others,” Pierce said. “The feds caused the problem and the feds should pay to fix it.”"

And speaking of Nantucket, fans of whaling history know the story of how that port’s dominance of the whaling fishery ended in the mid-19th century when its harbor entrance was obscured by a sandbar, leading the novel and desperate measure of building a floating dry dock known as “The Camel” to lift whaling ships over the bar and into the city. The failure of the harbor and the Camel solution are widely regarded as the reason New Bedford took over from Nantucket as the primary whaling city on the East Coast. There’s a great article on the Nantucket Bar and efforts to overcome it at the Nantucket Historical Society’s website.

I had no problems waking up on Sunday morning to white-out blizzard-ish conditions and making the guilty decision not to drive to Boston to compete in the world indoor rowing championships, aka the CRASH-B Sprints. While I have no doubt I could have four-wheeled it up Route 3 and made my 11 am race at Boston University’s hockey arena without any problems, I realized as I lay in my warm bed at 6 am, wind gusts ratting the windows and doors, that driving 70 miles in a snow storm to subject myself to about seven-minutes of aerobic, lactic acid soaked hell was the definition of a competitive disorder and I would be far happier lounging on the couch in front of the fire drinking a snifter of armagnac and munching on cheese and crackers reading Shelby Foote’s The Civil War while a pot of hearty Portuguese kale soup simmered in the kitchen. And so I did just that, venturing out into the miserable windy storm just once around 3 pm to walk the dog down to the dock, re-fill the bird feeders and heated bird bath, and wonder why in the world I live in this god forsaken place.

My best friend Dan did make the effort and I had the pleasure of catching a glimpse of him on the live video feed of our heat courtesy of Concept 2 on my tablet. That I have any guilt and remorse for not going — my second year sitting out the event — is evident in this post. Dan broke the magic seven-minute threshold which for any 54-year old man is a commendable achievement. And so I will head to the gym later today and flog myself in the eternal quest to stave off the wolf pawing at my middle-aged door and try to lay off the cheese and crackers in the depth of this winter of our discontent.

I suppose harsh  northern climates can be given some credit to the rise of indoor-pursuits such as the arts and sciences because those of us who dwell in the darker, colder latitudes have to do something with the long winters to while away the time. Some of us discover things like calculus or write a majestic symphony… my grandfather had an awesome model train set. I try to persuade myself the Spartan mindset of a housebound northerner must be more intellectual than being pool-side at the Fountainbleu drinking a rum-drink and ogling the girls in their bikinis. What is it about northerners that equates hardship and harshness with a higher calling and moral superiority? Does pain truly build character? Is it true that there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing? Is there a Nordic-Anglo sensibility that regards a cold winter in a superior sense of self-flagellation and denial, lording it over the indolent tropics with their siestas and easy-living in Margaritaville? Do people who take cold showers have an edge over a beach bum? This is well-tilled philosophical ground used to justify European imperialism in the 19th century and I won’t drift into an uninformed disquisition best left to someone like Jared Diamond.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining that I can’t go for a row on the harbor or wear shorts outside this cold President’s Day morning because I actually look forward to the winter because I need dramatic seasons, love the weather, and worry that I will spend my old age in some shuffle-board community where the climate is constant and every day is the same.  I look at the senior citizens in the village –the ones who actually retired here and not in some planned community hell like Marco Island — and tip my hat to their decision not to follow the demographic herd south. On the other hand, I do dream of a life divided between Cotuit from May to November and somewhere idyllic, like Harbour Island on Eleuthera, from December to April. Alas, the money truck hasn’t run me over yet, and so I continue to slog it out in a place where wind chill is a factor and not SPF.

Here’s a few links to sources on the topic of latitude and IQ, in other words the theory best summed up by Jimmy Buffett in “Changes in Attitudes, Changes in Latitudes. Fascinating stuff with some interesting theories that are highly controversial but interesting to ponder nonetheless.

• The Utne Reader in 2011 on IQs being highest in the northern states: “According to a University of Central Missouri study,  states with cooler average temperatures are more likely to have populations with higher IQs—estimated from scores on a standardized test administered to students. 
  
• The best known authority and promoter of the latitude/IQ correlation is Richard Lynn, who’s work I have not read, but who is the lightning rod around the theory of race and IQ. He’s the most cited source if one Googles “latitude and intelligence.”

I would have loved to have handed these out in third grade to the other kids at the Perley Elementary School in Georgetown Massachusetts. Do little kids still do the cheap Valentine’s Day exchange? Anyway….it’s one of those days and I thought some Totalitarian Dictator Humor was in order. Click for a bigger view.

Courtesy of my daughter….

My friend thinks the The Weather Channel’s decision to start naming winter storms (the latest of course being “Nemo”) is brilliant in terms of a marketing move.  I disagree, preferring to grant that authority to the National Weather Service, which started naming hurricanes in the early 1950s to clarify things while reporting on the movements of multiple storms along the same coast.  Everyone is familiar with the alphabetical model that begins ever new year with the A’s and moves on up, alternating female and male names (beginning in 1979 after storms were exclusively named after women for three decade)s. Now the names are assigned by the World Meteorological Association.

Last week the Weather Channel jumped into the name game and dubbed what would otherwise be called the Blizzard of ’13, “Nemo.”  Along with their on-the-beach reporters who look so daring in their terrible L.L. Bean raincoats (I’d have a lot more respect if they were out there in real foul gear like Grundens or Henri Lloyds, L.L. Bean has mostly made crap for the last twenty years), the decision to assume the mantle of official storm-namer is pure b.s. with an gleaming eye towards grabbing more audience and eyeballs.

I’m by no means the first grumpy person to call foul and criticize TWC for such a blatantly commercial move. Other than giving the social media crowd a convenient hash-tag to tweet, naming blizzards doesn’t accomplish much in my opinion other than to reinforce the channel’s cheesy and breathless approach to each and every weather event that drives viewers to their channel.  I realize that in weather “heavy” areas of the country — I’m thinking about the Florida Keys — the Weather Channel is standard fare on most TVs in diners and bars, enough so that I’ve come to expect it while tucking into a plate of biscuits and sausage gravy turned pink with a couple blasts of Gator Hammock sauce before heading out for a day of bonefishing.

I prefer my weather straight from the official source, or as close to the source as possible. That means no Accuweather, no Weather Bug, no Weather Underground but straight to the National Weather Service which does an excellent job without resorting to advertising-aimed-at-the-elderly  for reverse mortgages and diabetes supplies that are otherwise-ignored channel’s bread and butter.  I’d rather read a professional forecast discussion written by a PhD level meteorologist  than listen to some soundbites by a cheese-dick gesticulating in front of a green screen projection of a weather map with the inevitable graphical phallus protruding from his groin. I want to compare the models, dwell on the millibars and follow the tracks and maybe actually learn something.

The Weather Channel deserves all the criticism it gets for this move. No competitor will honor their names and indeed they might start dubbing storms with names of their own (which some did). The official keepers of the weather, the NWS and the NMO don’t give snowstorms, blizzards, tornadoes, or earthquakes names because, quite simply, these events are very local, don’t affect a large swath of geography the way a cruising hurricane can, and generally don’t occur simultaneously with other events that might cause public confusion. I don’t want my natural disasters to be sponsored by Cialis.

The Atlantic Monthly has a good piece online about the absurdity of Nemo.

And in closing, the late great paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, on the futility of naming things:

“The passion for naming things is an odd human trait. It is strange that men always feel so much more at ease when they have put appellations on the things around them and that a wild, new region almost seems familiar and subdued once enough names have been used on it, even though in fact it is not changed in the slightest. Or, on second thought, it is perhaps not really strange. The urge to name must be as old as the human race, as old as speech which is one of the really fundamental characteristics by which we rise above the brutes, and thus a basic and essential part of the human spirit or soul. The naming fallacy is common enough even in science. Many a scientist claims to have explained some phenomenon when in truth all he has done is to give it a name. “

I’m not a fan of the International Olympic Committee. I ran afoul of their ass-hattery in 2008 in Beijing when I was working at Lenovo, a one-time sponsor. I was dismayed at their decision after Beijing  to drop baseball from the Games — a strange decision given the global spread of the sport through Latin America and Asia — but the news in the New York Times that the IOC is dropping wrestling is truly jaw dropping given the legacy of the ancient Greek games where wrestling was most certainly one of the main events along with the usual Ur sports of running and jumping and hurling javelins and discuses (disci?).

This is a sport they painted on Greek urns.  A sport so essential, so basic that it would seem to be sacred. But no, the Red Bull generation must have their X-games and so while sports like water ballet and beach volleyball and BMX bicycling get their moment of glory, the true test of man versus man, a sport going back to the Bronze Age, is dropped in a secret ballot by a bunch of bureaucratic bullies more concerned with their television revenue than the Olympic ideal. As a former wrestler (high school) it’s all sadder to see it go.

Here’s a link to the New York Times story.

“When you think of the Olympics you think of wrestling,” said Cael Sanderson, the wrestling coach at Penn State and a 2004 Olympic champion. “It was a marquee event in ancient Greece and in the modern Games. After running, it was the next sport to be part of the Games. Like track and field, the Olympics are the highest level. Some sports, it’s just not as special.”

Cousin Pete and I were swapping text messages yesterday afternoon. “IS PWR ON?” “WTF NSTAR?” (Nstar is our electric company) “I AM BAILING” “IF I BAIL THEN LIGHTS WILL COME BACK”

72 hours of a 19th century lifestyle (I don’t know what Pete was bitching about, he had a Honda generator plugging away on his back deck all weekend) but without the whale oil lamps, just crappy scented candles, LED lanterns, and the family collection of flash lights, and I was ready to shovel out the garage and decamp in the sedan for my Manhattan apartment. Instead I hit the gym and made arrangements to take a pity shower at a friend’s place in Osterville. The other squatters had just had their power restored and were decamping, so I took them up on the suggestion to spend the night there, came home, packed up the dog, some food and some old DVDs and settled in for a night of Swedish cinema, leftover coq au vin, and a glass of Talisker on another person’s couch.

Pete texted me at 8 that the power was back in Cotuit. So I turned off the tube, packed up the dog, and returned home to Cotuit in thick fog to a cheery house; a house alive for the first time in three days with the hum of furnaces, refrigerators, blinking alarm clocks and radiant heat.

Here’s what I learned in the darkness.

• Reading is everything. I plowed right through Charles Dubow’s first novel, Indiscretion on my Kindle, using a LED lantern to illuminate the e-ink. Then I resumed my reading of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War.
• The Grundig YB 400PE “Yacht Boy” radio is an amazing device. I bought it in New York in 1996 and it has become a cherished possession, living on my boat during the summer for listening to the Red Sox, in my shed in the spring to keep me company while I paint the boats. From a decent sound to the ability to pull in shortwave signals, this radio is what I want with me during any storm or zombie apocalypse. The sounds coming out of it broke the eerie silence of the house and kept me company. NPR (WCAI in Woods Hole), reggae music from the U-Mass Dartmouth radio station (WUMD) and folk from WUMB kept me from going full-Shining.
• Natural gas makes all the difference. The Vermont Castings gas stove and the four range-top burners on the stove kept the house around 55 degrees, even on Saturday night when temperatures where in the teens. No gas and the house would have been a freezer, likely bursting pipes and causing a complete disaster.
• Candles are pretty but useless and scare the hell out of me. Old wooden houses like mine tend to burn down in five minutes because of candles. The things are useless in terms of real illumination, are a pain to move around (hot wax drips everywhere), and can’t be left unattended.
• One thinks a lot about life before electricity. It’s a well known fact that rural electrification reduces birth rates and increases literacy, but to look out at the village center, streetlights (see post below) gone, only some dim flickers of orange from candles in the neighbors’ windows, and one can’t help but speculate about what life was like before electricity, especially in Colonial times, when the night meant the world shrank to the penumbra of the lantern, where candles were made by hand by rendering down pig fat and then dipping, over and over, strings suspended from sticks like we made in first grade. How did readers read and writers write? What happened to society at sunset? Families must have gathered around the fire, shared a candle or two, and talked. I know the old-timers kept one or two rooms heated and basically dressed and undressed there, bathed there, ate there, but slept in cold rooms (hence the old bedwarmers) under piles of blankets and comforters.
•  Bed time came more out of boredom than necessity. I was in bed by 10 each of the dark nights. One wakes at the earliest possible light because sunlight means life and the ability to get something done.
• Life off-line for a few days was a good thing. Sprint seems to have lost its cell signals in Cotuit as I was in roaming mode on my smartphone and barely able to get mobile data on the device. Roaming seems to chew through battery life, so I needed to turn the phone off while I slept, forgot to turn it on, and was unable to respond to text messages and calls asking if I was okay. The spare power cell that came with my Duracell Powermat was a great thing to have. I will not take Google for granted again. If I needed to know the frequency of a radio station, I needed to Google it. If I needed to know what percentage of Barnstable was in the dark. I needed a connection. If I wanted any media other than a book, I needed a connection. The news that the Obama administration is getting serious about Cyber warfare is timely: if the bad guys shut off the power the chaos will be astonishing. The thought is enough to turn a skeptic into a full-blown Prepper.
• My car became my charging station. I’d go for rides with the dog just to give the phone and spare battery a little charge.
• People drive like morons after storms. I think it’s the “soft and puffy” effect where they think the snow banks and pretty trees give them some cushioning, but in truth driving is still treacherous, especially because of the piles of downed trees sitting right on the edge of the road. Frozen storm drains create deep puddles, warm winds blow think mist across the streets, subtract the street lights, add in the usual winter-learning curve of remembering how to drive in icy conditions, and its a wonder I didn’t have an accident. (I did back into the house while trying to get out of the driveway, but that’s another story.
• Bird feeders become an amazing thing after blizzards, especially if one provides the birds some water.
• The power company’s “outage” map is a nice thing, but couldn’t they hire someone to provide a little more information? It was especially frustrating to see half of the village with lights and not know why or what the problem was. Obviously there is some sort of prioritization going on when it comes to restoring electricity — hospitals, public safety, traffic lights, commercial accounts come first — but how does the power company even know who is in the dark and who isn’t? How do they dispatch their trucks and crews? How does the power grid work? Why don’t we bury our power lines once and for all? Can you imagine the danger and agony of standing in a bucket truck in a full fledged blizzard splicing big cables together?
• I need to suck it up and install a generator.

Lights are on three houses away but I’m in a pocket of darkness and have been since Friday night. Candles, radio, a bottle of Talisker and a Kindle to keep me company.

It’s not so bad. But I would prefer lights.

Looks like another night without electricity. The gas stove and range are keeping the pipes thawed. Shoveled out from underneath this morning, cruised the beaches, and took the dog to the dock. Life has come down to eating, reading, and listening to the radio. We broke out the Strat-o-matic and are going to play the 09 Red Sox against the Yankees. I picked the wrong weekend to start watching the West Wing on Netflix.

I’ve wimped out on New York City today thanks to a single word in the National Weather Service’s storm warning.

“Historic”

I don’t want to be part of history and I don’t want to sit in the dark with two feet of mashed potato snow to shovel on Sunday morning but that seems to be my fate. I was in college in ’78 — the National Guard had to dig us out — and won’t ever forget the monster dumping that hit Cotuit in 2005 when we had drifts over the first floor’s window sills.   This one is forecast to drop a foot of snow and blow hurricane strength late Friday night through Saturday afternoon.

So time to start cooking, do what needs to be done where electricity is required, and get ready to make some history.