Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that no matter how long you wait in line for a resident parking sticker, there will be some reason that you can’t get it today:

“I’m sorry, but you need to show, not only your car’s registration, but also three pieces of mail delivered to you within the last 30 days, at least one of which must be a utility bill, bearing in mind that cable TV bills don’t count as utility bills.”

So tonight at dinner, I was proud to announce that it had taken me only TWO separate trips to our City Hall Annex to get one new resident sticker.

Frank may well have an insight into this problem. “Maybe any time they actually give you a parking sticker, some penalty gets deducted from their pay check?”

Reward for sore muscles after stacking firewood

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

It’s October–people who live in NH are just entering fireplace-marshmallow season!

This old fireplace was built in the 1890s by grad students of a Yale classics professor. The legend goes that he’d take “bad” boys to NH for a summer and have them build a small house from start to finish, with marshmallows and Latin verbs at night.

amo
amas
amat
amamus
amatis
amant

I love October, marshmallows, and fireplace fires.

Our logpile, or what Frank and I did this weekend…

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

…otherwise, the red squirrels who live in your neighbors’ yards will tease the red squirrels in your yard about what a slipshod homeowner you are.

Winter’s long and hard enough for the little squirrels. They shouldn’t have to get through it without their own woodpile.

…I’m one of many new people exploring Second Life.

This twilight scene comes from the garden store of Julia Hathor, who creates fascinating stuff with pale textures like waterfalls and (for Halloween) a little ghost-generator. Want one in your garden?

My favorite spot so far, however is Robin Wood’s store, not because I want to buy pink hair or a crystal ball but because she generously provides a free tutorial “temple” and a small garden full of lovely birdsound.

I bought the wings you see here from Robin Wood. How could I resist them? And really, I bought the wings for her.

My fellow “citizen journalists,” blush with me. After reading 700+ placeblogs, Lisa Williams has our number! “You know, a lot of citizen journalists are a bit shy. They don’t like to do cold calling and interviews. So what they do instead is dig into public documents, maybe put stuff that’s out there into a spreadsheet. Maybe in a way this is a kind of journalistic research that substitutes for stuff they don’t like to do. Or maybe it’s the kind of journalism you can do at 3 a.m.” That’s a quote, not from Lisa’s blog, but from her talk about her new project Placeblogger, last night at Harvard’s Berkman Thursday group. A few more favorite quotes, from my TextEdit jottings….

The (shy?) citizen journalists at GothamGazette.com are doing something Lisa says is great.

“They pick a public document of the week each week and actually read it and talk about what it means.”

How Lisa found the 700+ placeblogs she’s studied so far

“It was very low tech. I kept typing placenames from the atlas into my browser–and every time I threw that net into the water, I came back with more fish!”

Lisa’s good news for old-line newspapers about the zillion web-versions they’re creating:

“I don’t understand why newspapers aren’t trying to make money from technology transfer programs like the ones that universities have. Newspapers around the country are building out tomorrow’s legacy technology today–and they’re not making any money on it because every newspaper is building its own one-off.”

We know how a “real” reporter would cover a fire, a car crash, a meeting in Yourtown, NH. But how does somebody local tell the story? Lisa Williams says:

Placeblogs reveal a fiercely non-generic America that’s not about national big-box retailers, and they don’t feature the kind of broad, blunt coverage that results from driving by communities at highway speed, or flying overhead.

There’s little Red vs. Blue America or fad coverage here. They show America at the level of detail you get at a walking pace. Many of them are also delightful — they give a snarky insider’s view of a community that’s the closest you can get to teleportation — it’s like being there and listening to conversations on the street.

Tomorrow at Harvard, Lisa will launch Placeblogger, her project to aggregate headlines from 700+ placeblogs around the US, plus one in Antarctica!

Citizen journalists, my fellow snarky insiders, we have been notified!

Frank came home from MIT the other day puzzled. All of a sudden he’s getting many more requests for autographs than usual, and he couldn’t figure out why.

This morning, GoogleAlert probably told me why.

Frank’s response last month to a request from Poland to send autographed photos “for charity” got enthusiastic publicity on a website devoted to the business of fan mail. (The business of fan mail?)

Hello all, at first I’d like to ask You for adding me to the 10 $Allposters Gift Certificate, because the prize would be very helpful for the charity I’m collecting autographs for.
Thank You in advance, board of directors!
I got a digital camera from my brother, so now I’ll post maaaaaaaaaaany recent successes for my charity, stay tuned

Frank Wilczek – Nobel Prize Winner

Sent: 27 days ago

Rcvd: 10 days ago

Mr. Wilczek is awesome! He sent me many autographed photos, and a huge poster that is not on the photo.

Heh. “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Dear Ms. Lewis,

I am responding to your letters asking us to renew our NH homeowners’ insurance policy through your agency. My husband Frank Wilczek and I have transfered this policy to the care of Phelan Insurance in Cambridge, MA.

For 20 years, we have had a homeowners’ policy through [your company]. I don’t recall that we ever made a claim on you–just kept paying the premium, year after year.

In August of 2006, a microburst storm hit our NH neighborhood. A huge tree crushed my husband’s car, which is insured (with Commerce Insurance) through the Phelan Agency. When I called Phelan, our agent there was helpful and quick to get everything moving to pay our claim. In addition to paying for the car’s value, they also authorized the $200 payment it took to get the giant tree off the car so it could be towed.

In contrast, when I called [your company’s] office, I was treated quite brusquely. “Did a tree fall on your house?” the person asked. I said no, but giant trees had fallen all over our yard–clearing them away was going to be quite expensive. “If a tree didn’t fall on your house, you have no coverage.”

After thinking this over, I asked Phelan Insurance if we could transfer our NH policy to them when the premium next came due. I feel that if I ever need the insurance that we’ve been paying for all these years, the people at Phelan will be a lot more helpful.

Sincerely &etc…..

Is your resume a little boring? Check out this employment offer from Sweden:

If you have a Swedish hunting certificate and a medical background then you may have an unusual opportunity to combine your skills in Stockholm and Norrland…

“[W]e happen to know that there will be a lot of zombies in Stockholm on Friday the 13th. That’s when they traditionally appear, you know,” said Mona Holmquist.

But she was vague about the salary – and about whether there would be a bonus for landing one of the undead.

“I think that’s something for our HR department to decide,” said Holmquist.

Yes, do question HR carefully before you sign up!

One more phony excuse from the GOP got tossed out of court last week–and the civil case against NH phone-jamming lives on! Here’s the story from this week’s Manchester Union Leader: Hillsborough County Superior Court Judge Philip Mangones has dismissed a Republican Party counter-claim against the Democrats’ civil suit over the 2002 phone-jamming scandal. The GOP action contended the Democratic suit was part of a nationwide effort by the party to use the courts as part of an election strategy to manipulate the court system and media for political gain. Mangones didn’t buy it.

Who buys such a story? Not even the conservative Union Leader:

With L’affair Foley threatening to ruin his plans for another two years in power, U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert … blamed the scandal on the Democrats.

“(T)he Democrats have — in my view — have put this thing forward to try to block us from telling the story. They’re trying to put us on defense.”

At this point, there is not one shred of evidence to back up that claim. Yet even if the release of Foley’s e-mails and Internet chats were the fruit of a partisan plot, that does not change the facts of what happened, or rather what did not happen, before their release.

…Hastert’s obsession with maintaining power has corrupted his judgment and he can no longer be trusted to put the interests of the country above the interests of his party. Republicans must insist that he resign.

The same should be said of the Republican stonewallers still working hard, four years later, to cover up the truth behind the 2002 NH phone-jamming scandal.