Ye Olde but still serving

If you get a chance, go to the Ye Olde Oyster House, at 41-43 Union St., Boston, in a structure built in 1704 and since 1826 a restaurant. It's near City Hall and the waterfront.

The Union Oyster House has long lured famous people, such as the Kennedys and Daniel Webster, who used to stand at the bar and gorge himself with bivalves.

When I lunched there last year with  French journalist, media executive and novelist Jean Lesieur, I belatedly discovered that in  1796 Louis Philippe, king of France from 1830 to 1848, lived in exile on the second floor. There's a sign. He earned his living by teaching French to young women. When he became king, he didn't put on heavy royal airs and so was nicknamed the "Bourgeois King.''

Much later, labor economist and  Haverford College  President John Royston Coleman worked there  incognito as a "salad-and-sandwich man"  in the 1970s, writing about the experience in his book The Blue Collar Journal. He sure picked a spiffy place; that's cheating.

For some reasons, they had no raw oysters when I ate there with Jean. We had to settle with delicious but heart-stopping fried ones.

-- Robert Whitcomb

'First smell of mud'

"In crow's-foot patterns, like deltas

seen from the air, the freeze runs off.

Five flawless days, under an azure sky,

the townsfolk come out to look. They nod

knowingly at the first smell of mud.

Jacketless, we hop from bog to bog.''

-- From "January Thaw,'' by Allan Block

Eight-legged intelligent life

A Giant Pacific Octopus, a species that can be viewed at the New England Aquarium, in Boston.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

I  have  much enjoyed eating  grilled octopus. But after reading Sy Montgomery’s book The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of  Consciousness no more.

Ms. Montgomery,  after having done research at the New England Aquarium, in Boston, and elsewhere, convincingly describes the octopus as a very complex, intelligent and emotional creature and one that makes sensitive connections with humans. I think I’ll start confining my seafood consumption to clams, mussels and oysters.

Tim Faulkner: Frigid end in N.E. but 2017 was world's second-warmest

Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Despite ending on a frigid note, 2017 was a warm year for southern New England, and the planet.

Globally, a European Union climate agency calculates that 2017 was 2.16 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than pre-industrial temperatures, to earn the second-warmest year on record after 2016; 2015 was the previous second warmest.

Locally, 2017 was the eighth warmest for Rhode Island and Connecticut, and the 10th warmest for Massachusetts, according to the National Weather Service and the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University.

Driving up the temperatures was a record-warm February, which was 6.6 degrees above normal and the highest for the Northeast since 1895. Feb. 23 set a record of 66 degrees in Providence. The Bay State also had the distinction of having its first February tornado, which touched down in western Massachusetts.

It was the warmest October ever for New England. Massachusetts and Connecticut had their warmest autumns since data were taken. Providence had a record October, with an average temperature of 61.3 degrees, 7.7 degrees above normal.

Data from the National Weather Service shows that Providence had an average temp of 52.9 degrees in 2017. The state had an average temperature of 51.5 degrees; 2012 was the warmest year in Rhode Island since 1905, with an average of 52.9 degrees, and 2016 was the second warmest for the state, with an average temperature of 52.2 degrees.

Summer 2017 temperatures in Providence were slightly below average at 71.1 degrees, 1.35 degrees below the mean. Last spring had average temperatures, but last winter was the eighth warmest at 35.1 degrees, 3.3 degree above the average.

February was the seventh warmest in Providence, with an average temperature of 35.7 degrees. April was the third warmest in Providence, with an average temperature of 52.6 degrees, 3.5 degrees above average. May 18 reached a record 95 degrees. May 19 reached 91 degrees, breaking a record of 89 degrees set in 1906.

Winter 2017 was the eighth warmest in Providence. Jan. 12 hit a record 60 degrees, and January had an average temperature in Providence of 34.8 degrees, 5.6 above the mean.

Last spring was the fifth wettest for Providence, as April and May had nearly 14 inches of precipitation. In all, 2017 was close to the average for precipitation in southern New England. But 2018 began with record snowfall on Jan. 4, with 14.1 inches in Providence, 13.4 inches in Boston, and 10.2 inches in Hartford.

Tim Faulkner is a staff writer for ecoRI News.

Portsmouth, N.H.'s big architectural museum

The entrance to the Strawberry Banke historic district. Yes, they have summer there.

Strawberry Banke, a neighborhood in Portsmouth, N.H. , and settled in 1630, is lovely and fascinating because of the thirty-seven historic houses, some dating to the 17th Century, and protected there by historic district regulations. And the wider Portsmouth is a hip, highly entrepreneurial, techie and increasingly arty small city/port. Strawberry Banke got its name from the many berry bushes found there by English settlers.

Don Pesci: Desperate Dems trying to steal election by labeling Trump as crazy

Print of Willam Hogarth image depicting Bedlam Asylum, in London.

So-called psychoanalysis is the occupation of lustful rationalists who trace everything in the world to sexual causes - with the exception of their occupation

 -- Karl Kraus

U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, of Connecticut, has invited Prof. Bandy Lee, M.D., a Yale psychiatrist, to address “a gathering of fellow Democrats” at her lavish digs in Washington. D.C. The subject of the gathering will be President Trump’s alleged mental imbalance.

As do many Democrats, Dr. Lee thinks  that Trump is batty, according to an item in CTMirror: Recently Lee and two professors from Columbia – a university named, unfortunately, after Columbus – released a statement signed by 100 psychiatrists that said, “We believe that (Trump) is now further unraveling in ways that contribute to his belligerent nuclear threat.”

The Trump threat was a Twitter taunt in response to a statement from batty North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un that said, in effect, my nuclear weapons are bigger than yours. Sigmund Freud is reported to have said about cigars, “Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar,” meaning: try not to over-Freudenize everything. Sometimes a threat is only a threat.

The DeLauro salon no doubt will be full of like-minded folk. DeLauro is not in the habit of inviting discussion during her regular Wednesday salons; solidarity, not discussion, is mandatory for attendance. The 14-term congresswoman is unused to political opposition. Connecticut’s Third District, centered in New Haven and its suburbs, is a solid Democrat fortress. Since 1933, Democrats have held the district for all but six terms. DeLauro, one of the 50 richest members of Congress, is also one of the most progressive members of Congress.

Based on financial disclosures filed by members of Congress in 2014, the Center for Responsive Politics calculated DeLauro’s net worth at $15.2 million, 14 times more than the average member of Congress and 18 times more than the average representative. DeLauro is a feminist, a hipster and a fashion-forward one-percenter.

Of course, it would be foolhardy to deduce politics from personal wealth. Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt was redundantly wealthy and a progressive; Abe Lincoln started out poor, though he became a prosperous lawyer, and was a Republican. Is it not equally foolhardy to deduce mental stability from Tweets, or from what may appear to be an aggressive foreign-policy posture? Theodore Roosevelt, the first progressive president and a Republican – until he bolted a Republican convention that declined to choose him as a presidential nominee in the 1912 election and, like Lowell Weicker, started a party of his own, the Progressive Party – sent The Great White Fleet around the globe to display America’s new naval power to the world.

Mark Twain, among others, thought he was batty. Twain was quite serious when he wrote to his friend Joseph Twitchel in 1905, “We are insane, each in our own way, and with insanity goes irresponsibility. Theodore the man is sane; in fairness we ought to keep in mind that Theodore, as statesman and politician, is insane and irresponsible.”

To be sure, Twain was not a psychiatrist from Yale, and no one seriously attempted to impeach TR while he was declaiming progressivism from his bully pulpit. The attempt would have failed, because speaking softly – TR did not always do this – while brandishing a big stick was regarded at the time as a successful foreign-policy gambit. And it worked.

Why have the Democrats been attempting to hang a batty label around Trump’s neck?

It’s a long story. Democrats began with a failed attempt – so far – to show collusion between presidential candidate Trump and subversive Russians whose chief ambition was to spoil the campaign of Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Actually, the Putinistas were doing what Putinistas usually do – sowing discord to try to delegitimize American democracy, and in this the Russians have been, and are, alarmingly successful.

Conspiracy is a crime, collusion is not. When an elected president opens discussions with Russian diplomats – nearly always former KGB spooks -- he is practicing diplomacy, not collusion. The collusion charge was supported by an opposition research “dossier” assembled by a dirt digger whose work was useful to Democrats, whose presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, was a disastrous candidate, overconfident and, as Trump once said of one of his Twitter victims, a low-voltage campaigner. When Democrat fingerprints began to appear on collusion theories, battiness raised its ugly head.

Why go the batty route? Because you can impeach batty presidents, and the anti-Trump effort all along has pointed to impeachment. Hillary Clinton is not batty. And if she were, she is not president, by the grace of God and the wisdom of the American public, and therefore cannot be removed from office, which is the only outcome of an impeachment proceeding.

The bottom line is this: If you can’t win an election, you can always steal one. Rosa DeLauro has now put her fashion-forward shoulder to the effort.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Try to glom onto megacity wealth

The Boston skyline from across the Charles River in Cambridge.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

Emily Badger had a very important story in the Dec. 24 New York Times entitled “The Megacity, Untethered: Urban Giants are going global but losing their connections with smaller neighbors’’.

It basically says the such big globalized high-tech cities as Boston, San Francisco and Seattle no longer need as much their old connections with manufacturing centers, both nearby or elsewhere in America. She writes:

“The companies that now drive the Bay Area’s soaring wealth — and that represent part of the American economy that’s booming — don’t need these communities in the same way. Google’s {which also has a large operation in Cambridge/Boston} digital products don’t have a physical supply chain. Facebook doesn’t have dispersed manufacturers. Apple, which does make tangible things, now primarily makes them overseas.’’}

“A changing economy has been good to the {San Francisco} region, and to a number of other predominantly coastal metros like New York, Boston and Seattle. But economists and geographers are now questioning what the nature of their success means for the rest of the country. What happens to America’s manufacturing heartland when Silicon Valley turns to China? Where do former mill and mining towns fit in when big cities shift to digital work? How does upstate New York benefit when New York City increases business with Tokyo?’’

So how do the old manufacturing cities of, for example, Worcester and Providence deal with this problem? They become lower-cost extensions of Greater Boston, using their higher-education institutions to supplement the work being done in Greater Boston. They’re better positioned to do this sort of thing than are most old American mid-sized cities.

'Holes in the roads'

Why we get frost heaves.

"Testing the soul's mettle,
the frost heaves
holes in the roads
to the heart,
the glass forest
raises up its branches
to praise all things
that catch the light
then melt.''

-- From "New England Winter,'' by Erica Jong

'Fleeting fragments'

"Ukiyo6'' (encaustic and oil on wood), by Steven J. CabraL, in his show "The Depth of Stillness,'' at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, through Jan. 28.

The gallery says:

"The  Ukiyo Series focuses on shifting perspectives and depths. It offers a journey of interactions filled with forms and lines that drift above and glide through atmospheric planes, while evoking a sense of energetic playfulness and movement. This collective body of work is a synthesis of inner thoughts and emotions which are depicted in narrative hues and shapes, meant to capture the fleeting fragments of past, present, and future.''

Schuss to the N.E. Skl Museum

The New England Ski Museum, in Franconia, N.H.,  in the appropriate time of the year. That's Cannon Mountain behind it. 

The Cannon Mountain Ski Area is state-owned and has nine lifts servicing 165 acres of skiing (158 with snowmaking). In the 1930s, the  New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps  (CCC) cut six ski trails, some later incorporated into the Cannon Mountain Ski Area. The CCC and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) completed many attractive and useful public works during the Great Depression that are still with us.

The New England Ski Museum is a wonderful place, rich with history. To read about it,

An exhibit in the museum celebrating a local hero.

A big Mormon moves on Vermont

Royalton, Vt.

The White River Valley in Vermont continues to be all shook up by the plan  by David Hall, a very rich Mormon businessman from Utah, to build a bunch of 50 “villages,’’ each with up to 20,000 residents (!) in in the now generally bucolic towns of Tunbridge, Stafford, Royalton and Sharon. Mr. Hall’s NewVistas project envisions residents living in tiny housing units, thus letting most of the land be kept as countryside, and assisted by hyper-high-tech gadgets.

Of course, many of the area’s current residents hate this idea. But Mr. Hall has big piles of money as well as patience. (His father invented synthetic diamonds.)_

Why that area? Well, one reason is that Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, was born in 1805 on the town line between Sharon and Royalton. There’s an  obelisk and museum in Sharon in his honor. It’s well worth a visit. (I’ve spent a lot of time in this rolling countryside.)

As the polite but relentless Mr. Hall pushes his dream, expect an entertaining war with stubborn Vermonters; okay, many of them are from New York.

A funny town?

Downtown Plymouth, N.H.

''There's such an odd, eclectic group of people that make up the town of Plymouth, New Hampshire. I don't think I could avoid not coming out of there with a pretty good sense of humor.''

 -- Eliza Coupe (actress) and Plymouth native.

Plymouth country scene, circa 1910.

Alexandra Coso Strong/Caitrin Lynch: Learning from a moonshot

On the campus of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Needham, Mass.

From the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org):

Each year, colleges around the nation select a common reading book for their incoming students or, in the case of our institution, for the entire college community. In 2017, our institution selected Hidden Figures as a reading meant to provide a common intellectual experience, illustrate the vigor and breadth of our college’s curriculum, and lend itself to a convocation discussion at the start of the school year.

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, by Margot Lee Shetterly, shares the stories of four women of color who worked as human “computers” at Langley Research Center, in Hampton, Va., at the start of the space program. Katherine Johnson, who turned 99 this past August, was “the girl” whom astronaut John Glenn called on in 1961 to verify that the computer’s calculations were correct. These calculations would dictate the trajectory that would bring his orbital flight capsule safely back to Earth. Through these stories, readers learn about these heroes in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and the invisible challenges they faced both inside and outside of work.

Now, in the deep cold of the New England winter, we begin the process of selecting next year’s summer reading. We have been reflecting on how Hidden Figures provided us the opportunity to engage with our students and colleagues on topics we might have not otherwise prioritized at the start of a school year. The form and impact of those discussions underscored for us that a good summer reading book carries with it profound immediate lessons and long-lasting consequences for the shape of intellectual debate in a community.

Fighting hate then and now

Our college community read Hidden Figures during the days surrounding the racist violence in Charlottesville, Va., and around the time of the release of a Google employee’s memo arguing that women are intrinsically less qualified for tech jobs. The historical context of the book’s narrative hits close to home in the wake of these and recent events. Its “hidden figures” point to an under-discussed example of diversity in STEM and allow us to acknowledge the critical role diverse teams have played in our nation’s history.

When our students returned to campus, Hidden Figures gave us a chance to engage in collective dialogue about not only diversity in STEM, but also these timely national issues via a compelling and concrete example. We embarked on these conversations knowing that progress in this area would rely on us building a community of trust and understanding.

Bringing our full selves to work

At a time when our country simmers with hatred, fear and misunderstanding, we, two women professors, an aerospace engineer and an anthropologist, find inspiration in the stories of Katherine Johnson and her colleagues—white and black, women and men. These individuals came together, despite Jim Crow laws and the societal pressures around segregation in the state of Virginia, to build America’s space program.

This collaborative spirit did not happen overnight, though. These Langley co-workers developed respect for and mutual understanding about each other’s backgrounds, family contexts, and skills over time, as they worked together towards a common goal. This is a lesson for all of us today: We are all products of our personal histories and differences, which impact our perspectives and our approach to problems. The Hidden Figures story represents a powerful example of what is possible when we take the time to acknowledge the complexity in the lives of people we ostracize and to join together, regardless of and because of our social differences, to achieve a collective goal.

Engaging history to find a way forward

As professors in an engineering college, this book gave us the chance to consider our work with engineering students and to ask questions about the book’s deep resonance with today’s society. While this book does not provide the answers to the challenges we face as a society, the stories of these women of color can help us shape how we collaborate with our colleagues and students.

These women are the role models we didn’t have in our own educational experiences, yet they paved the way for generations of women of color to pursue degrees and careers in STEM. By helping students connect these and other personal stories and experiences to their own, we can change the narrative of what it means to belong in STEM fields. These unsung heroes in Hidden Figures were the mathematical and engineering brains behind the operations, who helped take America to the moon, in spite of the challenges they faced inside and outside the workplace. As we engage with our students, we continue to think critically about how to support diversity within our community and a sense of belonging by each member within STEM and related fields. Through our curricular designs, we aim to help each student foster the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to be a creative problem solver and an effective team member.

Taking one big step together

Hidden Figures and similar stories must be told as we continue to write our national history. It’s these personal stories, historical and current, that we should discuss with our colleagues and our students in the coming years, recognizing the our opportunities and challenges as a nation are wide-reaching as they affect all individuals, not only those in the military or scientific communities. Through collective engagement about these topics we can better understand how to overcome the workplace, societal, and educational systems and policies that impact our abilities to come together as a community to support one another and our future as a nation. This is our country’s next moonshot.

Alexandra Coso Strong is an aerospace engineer at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering and Caitrin Lynch is a cultural anthropologist at the college.

An unusual ad for a law firm

Herewith a very retro and very cutting-edge ad for a Rhode Island law firm.  Please hit this link.

From Dartmouth to World Bank to Harvard presidency?

Massachusetts Hall (1720), Harvard's oldest building.

Who are the leading candidates to be the next president of Harvard? One, apparently is Jim Kim, M.D., a former Dartmouth president and the current World Bank president. Hit this link to learn more.

Video: Volcanic New England?

Learn about the molten rock rising under New England by hitting this link.

Don Pesci: The desperate search for a governor independent of parties

The hunger for an independent governor – that is, one who is independent of party allegiance -- begins to approach the intensity of the search for the Holy Grail.

Independence is regarded as a boon for several reasons, one of them best stated by Mark Twain: “Look at the tyranny of party -- at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty -- a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes -- and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master.”

Towards the end of his life, following the death of his wife Olivia and the shattering death of his daughter Susy from spinal meningitis at age 24 while Twain and his wife were in Europe, Twain put aside his political inhibitions. His daughter died while Twain was on one of his European jaunts attempting to work his way out of bankruptcy. These were not happy years. His wife, as good wives do, had served as an anchor and political censor for much of his writing life. After her death, all the shackles fell off.

And the first prominent politician who felt Twain's public bite was Theodore Roosevelt, the nation’s first progressive president. Twain thought TR was a successful political showman, but a preposterous fraud: “Mr. Roosevelt is the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the twentieth century; always showing off; always hunting for a chance to show off; in his frenzied imagination, the Great Republic is a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for audience; he would go to Halifax for half a chance to show off and he would go to hell for a whole one.” The disapprobation was returned by TR, who said, “I would like to hang Mark Twain.”

Roosevelt’s independence of party was on display during the 1912 election when, having been refused the nomination of the Republican Party, Roosevelt ran for president under a progressive flag – The Bull Moose Party.”

Both as senator and governor, Lowell Weicker was a progressive independista. Having lost his U.S. Senate seat to former  state Atty. Gen.  Joe Lieberman, Weicker ran for governor under his own flag, A Connecticut Party, and won the general election by putting up a false front during his campaign. Instituting an income tax in the middle of a recession, said Weicker, would be like pouring gas on a fire. Connecticut’s income tax is Weicker’s legacy to his state. Weicker was as bullish on Weicker as TR was on TR. There was no love lost between Weicker and his Republican Party. Even today, there are Republicans who insist, not without cause, that Weicker, during his last years in the senate, was a faux Republican. But he certainly was – at least in respect to the state’s Republican Party -- an independent. His autobiography is titled “Maverick.” And it should not be forgotten that an income tax is the point of progressivism’s spear, the sharp edge of its sword.

Two party Republican governors followed Weicker in office. One, John Rowland, campaigned on repealing the income tax. Rowland ended up in prison on charges of corruption. Jodi Rell followed Rowland into office, retiring after a full term with an approval rating much higher than that of Gov.  Dannel Malloy who, like Weicker, whipped his state with the highest and second highest tax increases in Connecticut history. Rowland and Rell were hobbled by a General Assembly dominated for nearly half a century by Democrats slouching towards progressivism.

Malloy was not inhibited by legislate drag. It would be fairly accurate to say that Weicker and Malloy, both progressives, were independent in this sense: both were rather more like Twain's TR than his William Howard Taft, whom Twain much preferred to TR. Both Weicker and Malloy overcame Republican Party opposition. The failure of progressivism in Connecticut became evident – indeed, obvious to anyone who was not a progressive – towards the end of Malloy’s first term, when the state began to leech entrepreneurial capital and young entrepreneurs to contiguous high tax states such as New York and Massachusetts.

Roland Lemar, a young Democratic state representative who works on campaigns statewide, adequately summed up the chief problem his party will be facing in the upcoming elections: “The Democratic brand in Connecticut is suffering to the point that our natural advantage that we should have in a mid-term election with a Republican president, with Democratic ranks of voters far outnumbering Republicans, we’ve lost that advantage. All the natural advantages that we should have we don’t have right now because our brand has suffered and we don’t have a candidate who can articulate where we should be.” The Democrat Party has moved too far to the left.

The Republican Party, as always, is suffering from timidity. It has not been able in past campaigns to tie the knot – to prevent the thread from slipping from the needle’s eye. But neither party needs a  world-savior governor independent of either party. Been there, done that.

Don Pesci is a Vernon,.Conn.-based essayist.

The thaw and the catalogs

"There are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter.  One is the January thaw.  The other is the seed catalogs."

--  Hal Borland

Between creation and collapse

Work by Kirsten Reynolds in her show "Spin,'' through Jan. 28 at Boston Sculptors Gallery

The gallery says: "Poised between perpetual creation and imminent collapse, Kirsten Reynolds' large-scale, site-specific architectural installations activate the agency of uncertainty. Her work explores language, architecture and the body as related rational constructs that become flexible and emergent through humor, curiosity and wonder. The absurd architectural tableaus create a space between fact and fiction that the viewer can enter, becoming a participant in an irresolvable narrative.''

The 'Sacred Cod'

The "Sacred Cod'' hovers over the proceedings of the Massachusetts legislature.

"Generations of mariners have testified to the ocean's bounty -- in the 'Sacred Cod,' that marvelous and deceptively simple carving that hangs in Boston's State House.''

-- From The American Book of Great Historic Places (1957)

'