Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Bedford Minuteman Company’s Annual Parade and Liberty Polecapping

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From The Bedford Citizen:

On Saturday morning, April 12, 2014, several hundred American Revolutionary War re-enactors from all over Eastern Massachusetts will muster on our Bedford Common. At the stroke of ten-thirty, the troops will step off onto the Great Road, playing fifes and beating drums, flourishing their ancient colors, and firing a few deafening rounds from their muskets. At the end of a short march, minutemen and spectators will mass around Wilson Park to watch Bedford’s historic Polecapping…

[Historically, Wilson Park is the site where] Bedford Minutemen and Militia met at dawn on April 19, 1775 to march off to Concord.  Now, it holds the memorial to their Captain, Jonathan Wilson, who was killed on that day.  And it also holds a stark, bare Liberty Pole…

[In] the years before the American Revolution… patriots would protest [taxation without representation] below their liberty trees and, when the British Regulars cut those down, the patriots erected liberty poles. At that time, a red cap was widely recognized to be a liberty cap, and to flaunt one atop a 20 or 30 foot pole was a deliberate slap in the face to King George and the English Parliament.

Liberty poles were ubiquitous in the 1760s and 1770s, but now, Bedford’s ceremony is unique in Massachusetts.

See also the Bedford Minuteman Company’s website.

 

It runs to completion

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Engineer 1:  Can you explain what that section of code is supposed to accomplish?

Engineer 2:  No.  We don’t have any documentation and no one knows.

Engineer 1:   Okay, well, I dug into it and, while it’s not clear to me what it was intended to accomplish, I investigated and established that all it does is slow down the data collection rate and add noise to the data collected.  I recommend we remove it.

Engineer 2:  Mmm…  I don’t think that’s a good idea.  The code is stable as is.  We don’t want to risk breaking it.

 

Error vs Folly

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Follies are not errors. Errors are mistakes; they are policies or positions people adopt that can be abandoned when they’ve proved to be self-defeating or to have unfortunate or even disastrous unintended consequences. A folly is a policy so thoroughly associated with the groups that support it that they can’t abandon the policy without destroying themselves.

– John Gray

10th Annual Interfaith Homelessness Forum

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Press release from The Advocacy Network to End Family Homelessness via The Bedford Citizen (emphasis mine):

With a record number of homeless families in motels and a housing shortage, what can we do?

Some answers will be explored at the Tenth Annual Interfaith Homelessness Forum to be held from 3 to 5 pm on Sunday, March 2, at Concord’s Trinitarian Church, 54 Walden Street. The event is co-sponsored by, among others, First Parish in Bedford and Bedford’s State Representative Ken Gordon is among the speakers.

Learn about state homelessness prevention programs – especially state plans for significant increases in low income housing. The challenges to and improvements in the state homelessness program will be presented and discussed. Find out how you can focus your advocacy efforts to have the greatest impact.

  • Between 2008 and 2013, the number of Massachusetts families living in motels and shelters paid for by the state increased by over 50%
  • A record number of over 2100 homeless families are in motels: the numbers in motels hase increasing by 200% since 2008.

The Keynote speaker will be Aaron Gornstein, Undersecretary, Department of Housing and Community Development. Additional speakers include Kelly Turley, Mass. Coalition on the Homeless; Sen. Jamie Eldridge; and Rep. Ken Gordon.

Related links:

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An under-the-radar holiday?

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Last weekend my daughter was curious why the manger displays were still up.  Christmas was over after all.  Is it wrong for me to tell her and her brother that on January 2 baby Jesus comes out of his creche* and if he sees his shadow then he hibernates until next Christmas;  if not, then he comes back at Easter**.

* “Creche” has not yet caught on with my kids.  To them it is a “baby Jesus setup.”

**  I didn’t get to complete this story.  I started but then my wife realized where it was going and shut me down.

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Lydon is back!

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Christopher Lydon will be back on WBUR Thursday nights starting tonight!   Years ago he hosted a morning program on BUR, The Connection, which was the best radio show I’ve ever listened to.  The show covered just about every topic you could imagine and Lydon was a great host – got good guests and actually did his homework before the show so that he and his guest could have an intelligent on-air conversation.  He took the job very seriously.  The Connection started off as a local program then went national after a few years – still had a Boston focus though.  Anyhow, Lydon was let go after he and the station couldn’t negotiate a new contract.  The new host was decent but the show wasn’t nearly as good as when Lydon was host.  Lydon went off to create Radio Open Source, which is what BUR will be broadcasting on Thursday nights.  I listened to a number of episodes when it was internet only – all good – but tuning in required I go a bit “off the beaten path” so I didn’t listen often.  In contrast, BUR is my default station.  I’ll be glad to hear Lydon and I’m glad he’ll be getting a wider audience again.   He’s an excellent journalist.

Archive of The Connection broadcasts here.  (I think Lydon’s last broadcast was March 9, 2001.)