Phlog

Halsey Burgund’s Ocean Voices

Boston Phoenix — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:05:00 GMT

In my cover article for this week’s Phoenix, I explore the world’s imperiled oceans. It was a sobering story to report — learning that 100 million sharks are killed every year, or the that the seafloor is stripped of pounds of aquatic life, thrown back as waste, all in the interest of harvesting barely two thirds of a shrimp cocktail.

But if climate change, overfishing, and pollution have taken left the oceans worse for the wear lately, they still maintain their entrancing beauty and their primal hold on the human imagination.

Local musician and sound artist Halsey Burgund specializes in using the human voice, usually swathed in swirls of atmospheric music, to make aural art. Sometimes he travels around with his custom-made plywood recording booth, and asks people to speak into microphones. Sometimes he gathers recordings contributors make at home via the Web. People might respond to open ended questions, or they might expound extemporaneously on whatever they feel like talking about. In the past, he’s used the audio to make pointed social/political statements and has also put the field recordings to more purely aesthetic uses.

Burgund’s newest project, Ocean Voices, done in conjunction with marine biologist Wallace J. Nichols, asks recordees to recount their feelings about the ocean. With prompts such as “what does it feel like to be in the ocean” or “describe what makes up the ocean,” or “where does the ocean come from?” Burgund seeks to get at the experiential essence of the sea.

He’s already gathered 300 recordings so far — including two of Jacques Cousteau’s grandchildren, Celine and Fabien. In fact, part of the motivation for his project is to celebrate Cousteau’s 100th birthday in June. Burgund will also perform a musical composition, incorporating those spoken tones, at the California Academy of Sciences for World Ocean Day 2010 that same month.

Mostly, however, the project is meant to simply focus attention on the fertile and fragile salt water ecosystems that cover the planet. As Burgund writes in his artist statement: “The ocean surrounds us and sustains us. We can only preserve life in the ocean by working together as a global community.... Open your mouth; open your ears; join the Ocean Revolution.”

Listen to some of Burgund’s recordings so far — and record your own voice — at OceanVoices.org.

Is your doctor a greedy scumbag, or just a good Massachusetts liberal?

Boston Phoenix — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:04:00 GMT

The most entertaining theater in this grand health care showdown has been that in which physicians play the victim. Look at homeboy right here; don't you just feel awful about the potential impact of "Obamacare"? Make you want to donate five cents a day so Dr. Dickstain can move from the bay side to the ocean?

Unsurprisingly, Glenn Beck and other Fox News comics have ambitiously courted docs to blast the House and Senate health care bills. That contrarian crop has included more than a few plastic surgeons, who must have worked miracles on one another to keep straight faces while gargling such transparently self-serving talking points. (My colleague Mike Miliard suggested that Fox keeps nip-tuckers on-hand to perform routine service on the network's fleet of plastic blonde whores).

Like every other measure in the health care debate, it seems impossible to calculate how many MDs support the particular progress under way in Washington. Groups like the deceptively-named, doctor-designed Coalition to Protect Patients' Rights want you to believe there is an army of white coats behind them; but a September 10 D.C. march planned by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons drew less than 1,000 supporters.

Here in Mass, our agitators are at least progressive. You might have noticed the ad on page A13 of Wednesday's Boston Globe headed: "To Our Patients - From Massachusetts Doctors." Placed by Physicians for a National Health Program - and signed by nearly 200 docs from across the state - the spot declares: "This is bad medicine: We need single payer national health insurance - Medicare for All."

As someone who is not about to blow kazoos and celebrate the gutted bill that might surface when the smoke clears, this approach puts me in a tough position. My instinct is to criticize these Mass doctors for concealing conservative gusto in left-friendly packaging; on the other hand I agree with them. Surely this deserves further vetting; but until then - if you have a check-up between now and the end of this grueling struggle - put your doc on the spot. Is she or he is a greedy fraud or not?

Kelly's Roast Beef is taking the space in Allston where Marty's used to be

Boston Phoenix — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:06:00 GMT

Fletcher from the Sandbox on WFNX passes along this bit of news: Kelly's Roast Beef is opening in Allston.

The 58-year-old restaurant chain that takes credit for inventing the roast beef sandwich plans to revamp the former Marty’s Liquor store in Allston into its first Hub location. The 140-seat eatery will be the sixth for the Saugus chain that’s been named the 2009 Restaurant of the Year by the Retailers Association of Massachusetts.

I found this passage interesting:

With its Allston location at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Harvard Street, Kelly’s hopes to finally tap into the college market, which it’s been serving by catering for Boston College athletic teams and visiting schools.
McCarthy did some “research” on his plan’s viability by spending weekday nights in April through July having a few beers at Boston bars and quizzing college students about where they go to eat.

Not sure field research was necessary to figure out that a place like Kelly's, which is relatively cheap and offers some pretty big portions, would do well in a neighborhood full of college kids (this is a neighborhood where Redneck's has been operating for . . . how long now?). But at the same time, it's nice that a locally-owned establishment is taking that space.

Hey, look! Former Phoenix intern in Daily Show bit on Palin book

Boston Phoenix — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:42:00 GMT

We're proud to say that former Phoenix intern Sam MacLaughlin (bro to former Web Managing Editor and scribe Nina) is featured in this Daily Show clip about the ~~mad rush~~ slow crawl to buy Sarah Palin's new book ("So you've come in character as everything that's wrong with America!"). He's the bookish lad around the 2:45 mark: "One more than seven!"

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Excitement Over Sarah Palin's Book Release

www.thedailyshow.com

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Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

Kenmore cat can't be caught

Boston Phoenix — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:06:00 GMT

It's hard to believe it was only a year ago that unfortunate riders on the Green Line had nothing to look forward to but a cramped, jerky evening commute. Now we have a new mascot to make our day just that much brighter: a chubby, bushy-tailed furball by the name of Kenmore Kat. Take that, Red Liners!

For awhile, it seemed like the tale of the domestic cat living in Kenmore station was purely apocryphal, and Kenmore Kat was the type of legend only occasionally spotted by your friend's boyfriend's cousin's barista. But lately, the feline must be feeling more comfortable with its new-found fame, as sightings have become more frequent and less far-removed.

Readers at Universal Hub have been carefully documenting Kenmore Kat news since Sept. 3. One commenter reported this week that MBTA employees and passengers have been caring for the feline, who has lived in the station for roughly seven to eight months. Kenmore Kat has reportedly "mastered the sequence of the trains" to ensure he isn't smashed into kibble by a C train.

I spotted the cat myself about three weeks ago as it sashayed down the tracks, batting at whatever other creatures it rules over in the Kenmore tunnels and reducing grown men to concerned calls of "here kitty, kitty." Yesterday, our own Shaula Clark managed to photograph the elusive, up-and-coming feline superstar for the first time in daylight.

While Kenmore is undoubtedly one smart kitty - hell, I've been commuting to and from Kenmore for three months now and have yet to "master the schedule" - but it's still hard to believe that this well-fed, docile fellow can't be caught by animal control. And judging by this picture, they're not trying too hard. It's time to call in the big guns. Dale Bozzio is great at catching cats, as is, presumably, Heidi Erickson. There's also a handy how-to on the always insightful wikiHow, which even outlines the tools needed in your cat-catching arsenal (cat food, cat treats, cat toy... cat). So let's pack up the Meow Mix and GET THAT KITTEH.

PODCAST: Cory Doctorow talks Makers, 3-D printers, and Disney at Harvard Book Store [MP3]

Boston Phoenix — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:11:00 GMT

Cory Doctorow opens his mouth, and nerdgasms fall out: at any given moment, he's liable to be spouting off about feral robot dogs, space domes over Disney World, or building a haunted hotel modeled after a Quake level ("I'll open-source this idea," says he). And we'd expect nothing less -- after all, he's one of the superclocking brains behind BoingBoing, that exalted bestiary of sweet-ass geekdom.

In his blogging career, Doctorow's pitched plenty of woo at maker culture and all things steampunk, while railing against DRM. But he writes fiction, too -- under a Creative Commons license, of course. Following the success of Little Brother (in which a clutch of teenage hackers find themselves falsely imprisoned and tortured when a terrorist bombing transforms San Francisco into a police state), Doctorow's latest is Makers (which you can download or read on Tor for free), where two fringe inventors defibrillate a collapsed economy with 3-D printers and an FDR-ish "New Work" movement. Then Disney gets its Mickey Mouse mitts on the issue, and all hell breaks loose. According to Doctorow, the 3-D printers around which the story revolves serve as "a metaphor about the panic of the replication of digital goods." So at his packed Harvard Book Store appearance on Monday night, he must've gotten a kick out of Paige M. Gutenborg, the HBS's print-on-demand book machine.

After a brisk reading, Doctorow spent most of his time fielding audience questions -- or, as he jokingly put it, "thinly veiled polemics disguised as questions." But his fans were perhaps the most well-behaved bunch of question-askers ever to grace the People's Republic of Cambridge. Unlike at E.L. Doctorow's reading a couple months back, not a single attendee lobbed a query so cringe-inducingly awful it made me pray for spontaneous human combustion. In fact, the discussion was downright lively. Behold the resulting nuggets of wisdom.

Doctorow on computers as literary devices in cyberpunk: "I think William Gibson is a genius and a treasure to the human race, but if I were designing a cyberspace deck, I'd put a circuit breaker in it."

On why he publishes under a Creative Commons license: "There is a certain romance of being a blacksmith at Pioneer Village, but I'm a science-fiction writer; I'm supposed to be making at least contemporary, if not futuristic, art. And so making contemporary art that's not supposed to be copied, to me, just doesn't make any sense."

On piracy: "If it wasn't for mixtapes, my entire adolescence would have been celibate."

On the role of the sci-fi author: "There's this old aphorism that the job of the science-fiction writer is to look at the movie theater and the automobile and predict the drive-in ... but I think if you want to be a great predictive science-fiction writer, you should look at the automobile and look at the movie theater and say, 'We will have drive-ins, which will incentivize children to get driving licenses, which will mean that for the first time, citizens of Western democracies will routinely carry photo ID, and in 25 years, we'll have a surveillance state.' "

On why we shouldn't dismiss fanfic as trivial: "That's like judging a sex act by what's left behind on the sheets. It's a process, not a destination."

DOWNLOAD: Cory Doctorow reads from Makers [MP3]

Recorded live at the Harvard Book Store on November 16, 2009. To subscribe to this podcast, use this RSS feed or bookmark the Boston Phoenix podcast blog.

Leonid meteor shower still visible tonight-tomorrow am

Boston Phoenix — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:47:00 GMT

Though I missed the real show -- which was this morning between 3:30 and 5:30 am (but in reality even if I had known there's no way in HELLZ I would be awake that early) -- it is still possible to catch the spectacular Leonid meteor shower tonight/early tomorrow morning.

The Leonid meteor shower, called so because it happens around and near the constellation Leo, is leftovers from the comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle that scattered space dust around the year 1533. The Earth moving through that dust makes these fantastic "shooting stars" throughout the sky. The shower was most visible in Asia and said to have produced hundreds of "shooting stars" per hour, 300 to 500.

In North America, the sites were less dramatic (30 to 50 or so per hour) and will be even less so tomorrow morning/tonight, but you could catch a few here and there if you look long enough in a dark area (sorry Bostonians, the lights of the city are too blinding for this shower). Good luck!

Catch a great slideshow of the shower from years passed at HuffingtonPost.com

VIDEO: The Wire's greatest 100 quotes

Boston Phoenix — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:32:00 GMT

This has been making the rounds: some enterprising soul has compiled the 100 best lines from The Wire, a show whose greatness we've talked about enough already. For those who haven't seen the whole thing yet, be aware that there are spoilers from all five seasons in there.

Go buy a book at Lorem Ipsum so they don't have to close

Boston Phoenix — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:01:00 GMT

This shit just got real.

We were forwarded an e-mail this morning from the folks at Lorem Ipsum Books in Inman Square, Cambridge. In short, the e-mail says that Lorem Ipsum, one of the best book stores in the general Boston area, needs to move, and they need some money to do so, so they're holding a book drive. Their goal: to sell 5,000 books in the next 10 days. Will that be difficult for them? Maybe. Impossible? We sure hope not. Here's the announcement, which can also be read at their blog:

Help Lorem Ipsum Out
For the past 6 years, our small independent bookstore in Inman Square, Cambridge has been a place for books, community, and innovation. We now face a difficult hurdle in a difficult industry in a difficult economy: the store must move—or close.
Luckily, we found a better space (more books! room for events!) but we need the funds to make it happen. Maybe you’ve sold books when you’ve had a cash crunch — well, that’s exactly what we’re looking to do now, only on a bit bigger scale:

Ten days. Five thousand books.
That’s right — selling five thousand books in our inventory (of 19,000) will raise the cash we need to fund the move, hire staff, and set up bigger and better than before in a new location a few blocks away. (Don’t worry, still in Inman Square area, and we’ll bring the Chicken Machine with us.)
Here’s how it works:
Buy certificates online via Google Checkout in handy $10 amounts.
Starting December 1, redeem each certificate for any book (priced at $20 or less — see what an awesome deal this is?) at the store or online.
Participate by visiting this page which will take you to Google to buy the certificate. We’ll email you the certificate soon after your order is processed.
We don’t have much time, so help us get the word out!
Please spread the word—in order for this flash sale to work, we need as many people as possible to know about it. Once you purchase your certificate, please spread the word by telling your friends about us. UseTwitter, Facebook, semaphores, or any other form of gossip to get the word out.

Many thanks for your support,
Lorem Ipsum Books

CDC changes its mind: Immigrants don't need HPV vaccine to enter US

Boston Phoenix — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:02:00 GMT

Immigrant girls and women will no longer be required to get the HPV vaccine before filing for their green cards, read an article from the Associated Press today. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requires a host of vaccines be given to immigrants applying for green card status, however, starting December 14, HPV will no longer be on that list.

The reason? Mostly because American citizens are not required by law to get the shot either, so why should immigrants be singled out?

While HPV remains the single most widespread sexually transmitted disease in the country, only a small percentage of those infected with the virus will go on to develop life-threatening diseases like cervical cancer. The cost-effectiveness of the Gardasil vaccine (the HPV vaccine) remains largely in debate. The price of the vaccine, which is administered in three separate shots, can cost anywhere from $400 to $1000. Insurance companies do not cover health services required for immigration purposes, the AP reported.

"More than half of the immigrants who come to the U.S. seeking opportunity are women," Silvia Henriquez, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, said in a statement. "We thank the CDC for restoring their dignity and reproductive justice."

Girls and women between the ages of 11 and 26 who were seeking to become legal permanent US residents were required to get at least the first dose of the HPV vaccine, which protects against some strains of the virus blamed for cervical cancer, the Associated Press reported. The Gardasil shot was added to the vaccine list for immigrants in July 2008 by the CDC.

To find out more about the vaccine and this latest development, read the full AP story.

Can plastics make your baby boy a sissy?

Boston Phoenix — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:08:00 GMT

A University of Rochester pilot-study reveals exposure of two common phthalates (chemicals found in plastics) while in the womb can be linked to boys playing with more girly toys in preschool, read a press release today. The study only looked at 145 preschool children, but the press release reads that "when the concentrations of two common phthalates in mothers’ prenatal urine are elevated their sons are less likely to play with male-typical toys and games, such as trucks and play fighting."

While phthalates are generally chemicals used to soften plastics, some recent studies have shown that a major source of human exposure to the two phthalates in this study (and those of the most concern) are entering our bodies from food. These phthalates, DEHP and DBP, are used primarily in polyvinyl chloride which were once found in plastic wrap like Saran Wrap and plastic water bottles is no longer found, according to NIH, in "any other type of plastic food packaging sold in the United States." Which is confusing because accoridng to this study, pregnant women packaging, storing, or heating food with any PVC-containing products can introduce them these phthalates into her unborn baby's system and therefore cause her baby boy(s) to become more girly in their toy-choosing later in life. So how are they getting them into their system if not through food packaging materials? Sadly, I don't have the answers to this.

Could drinking out of a plastic bottle while preggers make your baby boy a sissy? Not likely.

“Our results need to be confirmed, but are intriguing on several fronts,” Shanna H. Swan, Ph.D., professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and director of the URMC Center for Reproductive Epidemiology, said in a statement released earlier today. “Not only are they consistent with our prior findings that link phthalates to altered male genital development, but they also are compatible with current knowledge about how hormones mold sex differences in the brain, and thus behavior. We have more work to do, but the implications are potentially profound.”

So while a lot of work still needs to be done to definitively say DEHP and DBP are creating sissy boys, we pregger women should stay on alert.

Correction: In an earlier version of this blog post, the author erroneously reported that plastic wrap, notably Saran Wrap, contains PVC, in fact it does not contain PVC materials any longer.

PODCAST: Jonathan Safran Foer reads from "Eating Animals" [MP3]

Boston Phoenix — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:38:00 GMT

One night when Jonathan Safran Foer was 9 years old, his babysitter refused to eat chicken. A confused Foer asked her why, and she blew his mind by explaining that the meat on his dinner plate came from a live animal. "I went from thinking it was the most natural thing to thinking it was the most insane thing," Foer said.

And with that, the babysitter planted the seeds for Foer’s first non-fiction book, Eating Animals (which came out November 2). Foer, who tackled the Holocaust in Everything Is Illuminated and September 11 in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, has added another heavy topic to his repertoire: humanity's bloody relationship with animals.

Foer started off by reading a brief passage from Eating Animals at Brookline's Congregation Kehillath Israel on Wednesday night. But he chose to devote far more time to audience questions: “I don’t want to read too much, because I think this subject is best served by conversation,” Foer said.

And dominating Foer's end of that conversation was the idea that arguing over whether it’s wrong to sink your teeth into a veal cutlet is just a distraction from the real issue: factory farming. Foer insisted he's never heard anyone present a "cogent defense" of factory farming, which makes him believe that everybody who knows about it opposes it. "If you ate by the values you have, I'm sure factory farming would disappear very quickly," Foer said. "People would continue to eat meat, but nobody would eat this crap."

Audience members asked questions about Foer’s reaction to friends who continue to eat meat (he doesn’t want to alienate them), whether he’s optimistic about change (he is), and how he responds to accusations that vegetarianism is elitist (he said that the meat industry is elitist for forcing unhealthy food on the poor). Foer’s answers were peppered with statistics that would make Ronald McDonald consider ordering a veggie burger: 99% of our meat comes from factory farming; 90% of chickens are infected with E. coli; if Americans ate one fewer serving of meat per week, it would have the same impact as taking five million cars off the road.

Clearly, Foer did his research. But he insists he could pack his book with more statistics than an almanac and still not make a lasting impression -- what really changes minds is stories.

In that vein, one of the two excerpts Foer read recounted a conversation with his grandmother, who survived the Holocaust by scavenging for food in the forests of Europe. She told him that near the end of the war, a sympathetic Russian farmer gave her a piece of pork. But she refused to touch it, preferring to die than to betray the rules of kosher. When Foer asked her why, she replied, “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

“That’s really the thesis of this book,” said Foer. “There are certain things about us that are so primary, so fundamental, that to ignore them, to pretend that they don’t exist, risks really losing something about ourselves.”

DOWNLOAD: Jonathan Safran Foer reading from Eating Animals [MP3]

Recorded live at a Brookline Booksmith-organized reading at the Congregation Kehillath Israel on November 11, 2009. To subscribe to this podcast, use this RSS feed or bookmark the Boston Phoenix podcast blog.

Doing the math: Belichick's 4th-and-2 call was statistically better decision

Boston Phoenix — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:44:00 GMT

The New York Times's 5th Down Blog has done the math, and it turns out that the Patriots had a better chance to win the game by going for it on 4th and 2 from their own 28 than they would have if they'd punted:

With 2:00 left and the Colts with only one timeout, a successful conversion wins the game for all practical purposes. A 4th-and-2 conversion would be successful 60% of the time. Historically, in a situation with 2:00 left and needing a TD to either win or tie, teams get the TD 53% of the time from that field position. The total win probability for the 4th-down conversion attempt would therefore be:
(0.60 * 1) + (0.40 * (1-0.53)) = 0.79 WP
A punt from the 28 typically nets 38 yards, starting the Colts at their 34. Teams historically get the TD 30% of the time in that situation. So the punt gives the Pats about a 0.70 WP.

Statistically, the better decision would be to go for it, and by a good amount.

We don't pretend to understand the 5th Down's math. But we're certain that Belichick's decision would've made more sense if, well, he had a 5th down.

GAME RECAPS:

NY TIMES: Colts pull off improbable win as Patriots' gamble backfires
AP: Belichick's 4th down gamble fails
BOSTON HERALD: Colts capitalize on fourth-down failure

Now trending on Twitter: #patriots #bullshit #WTF #belichick

Boston Phoenix — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:40:00 GMT

Ugh.

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

- Belichick thug flattens NFL camerman. Too late. The game is already on tape. [Deadspin]

- Twitter results for "Bill Belichick has been playing too much Madden" [Twitter]

- Twitter results for "worst call of Belichick's career" [Twitter]

- Chris Mortensen: "Belichick's worst moment since Cleveland" [Twitter]

Missing Persons singer Dale Bozzio jailed

Boston Phoenix — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:16:00 GMT

Missing Persons singer Dale Bozzio is sitting in an Ossipee, New Hampshire, jail today after dropping her appeal of a March animal cruelty conviction.

Thirteen animal cruelty charges stemmed from Bozzio's failed attempt to "save" feral and sick cats from the New Hampshire woods. Two cats were found dead and 12 were put down following an undeterminable period of neglect that came to a head while Bozzio toured last fall (our exclusive photos from the scene can be viewed here, but be forewarned - they aren't for the faint of heart or stomach). She was found guilty of one count of cruelty to animals.

In May, Bozzio was sentenced to 90 days in jail with 60 days deferred for two years, plus 250 hours of community service. She was also ordered to pay a $2700 euthanization bill. That sentence has now been imposed.

After following the saga for nearly a year, I found Bozzio yesterday in a zen-like calm as she waited in the Carroll County District Court clerk's office with her husband Richard McKenzie and lawyer Dennis O'Connor. Known for her perky personality and happy-go-lucky songs like "Walkin' in L.A." and "Destination Unknown," the singer was friendly and positive that she would be just fine. She hugged me, blessing me and telling me "I respect you" before she voluntarily surrendered to the county jail.

With good behavior, Bozzio could serve as few as 20 days of the sentence. But given recent developments on the West Coast, the financially strugging star's troubles will unquestionably continue upon her release. Her former Reseda, California, landlord tells us he will now take legal action over skipped rent payments and at least $3,600 in cat-related damage.

For a more in-depth look at this story, pick up next week's Phoenix.