Tag: circa63

I got this email from Nancy Ryan, whom I met working on
neighborhood issues. She’s been intimately involved in Cambridge
politics for decades, worked for the city for quite a while as
director of the Cambridge Women’s Commission, and as executive
director of the Massachusetts ACLU.

I would add to her list that I’ve talked to people who’ve worked with
Fran Cronin and are enthusiastic about her bid for school committee. I
also think Craig Kelley works hard at communicating with voters, and
said some of the right things about the City Manager selection process,
or lack thereof.

In other words, I respect Nancy and will vote for everyone on her list
based on her recommendation if not anything else. I had independently
concluded that Dennis Carlone should get my number 1 vote. But I
usually continue on down the rankings (although I’m pretty sure my vote
always goes to my first, second, or third choice) quite a lot farther
than she does, so I will be ranking many of the people she doesn’t
mention ahead of other people she doesn’t mention.

Dear Cambridge Neighbors and Friends – Many of you have asked me what
I’m doing about the up-coming election so I’m taking the liberty of
sending my recommendations. Regarding City Council – this is a pivotal
moment in Cambridge. The city seems to be up for sale to large
developers who want to build upscale housing or commercial space in
high and dense buildings. Central Square is particularly a target. The
current City Council members have been inclined to grant up-zoning
petitions even with large protests from residents. There’s no overall
plan and huge development proposals about to be presented to the
Council.  Here are my recommendations and a request – would you
consider forwarding this email to lots of your friends and neighbors?
You can change it up to fit your own priorities but I URGE you to
recommend Dennis Carlone #1.

1. Dennis Carlone – A 40- year Cambridge resident and first-time
   candidate, an architect and city planner in Cambridge whose motto is
   “Planning for People.” He designed and implemented the East Cambridge
   Riverfront project in collaboration with the neighborhood. Dennis is
   committed to making sure the city has a Master Plan for development,
   traffic and transit that works to make the Cambridge of the future a
   livable, affordable and diverse community. He has refused all campaign
   contributions from developers. He raised his kids here and has a
   broader agenda, but right now it’s his expertise and grounded
   temperament that are sorely missing among our current City Council
   members. There is no one we need more at this time.
2. Nadeem Mazen – a young innovator and entrepreneur who opened two
   small businesses in Central Square — danger!awesome on Prospect
   Street that serves as a small digital engraving business and a
   training and mentoring center for young people; and Nimblebot.com that
   makes educational media and software for social entrepreneurs and also
   provides access to cutting-edge technology and job training. Nadeem is
   also a strong proponent of a master plan for development and traffic
   management as well as affordable housing. Having spent a few hours
   with him, I believe he can bring new ideas and energy coupled with
   leading edge skills and experience to City government. And he promises
   to stay in office only long enough to encourage and mentor other young
   people to step into his shoes.
3. Minka vanBeuzekom – completing her first term on the Council, Minka
   has worked hard to bring her environmental experience to bear on many
   aspects of development and green space in Cambridge. She’s also
   diligent – it was Minka who discovered that Forest City had not lived
   up to its 25-year-old  commitments to maintain low- and
   moderate-income housing on its University Park campus during their
   request for a massive up-zoning of their property. Her discovery
   brought the process to a standstill until Forest City made good on
   their promises, saving a large number of peoples’ homes. Minka is the
   only incumbent I can recommend, even though I wish she were a more
   consistent and strong voice. I am trusting that with new members as
   potential collaborators and two years’ experience, she will come into
   her own.
4. Marc McGovern – a strong advocate for the needs of families and
   children who, as a social worker in a therapeutic school for students
   with a range of emotional and learning problems, he has witnessed
   firsthand the needs of struggling parents and kids. As a School
   Committee member, he was willing to take controversial stands in
   behalf of the schools’ budget and the creation of middle schools
   because of his assessment of their impacts on the families most
   dependent on public schools. Because of his deep roots in this city,
   because of his stated commitment to increase affordable housing and
   early childhood education, I am putting some faith in him.  He will
   face temptations to finance increased services with large, mostly
   upscale housing developments that contain a very few affordable units.

That’s as far as I could go with City Council candidates.

School Committee – I am not deeply involved in the School Committee so
can only offer one strong candidate and some personal experiences or
comments that people have made about others:

#1 Kathleen Kelly – I have known Kathleen as a community activist and
parent and strongly recommend her as a first time candidate. She is a
unique combination of education and experience — a trained social
worker with an MBA who takes the social justice stand that public
education is the great equalizer in our society and has the capacity
to analyze budgets and policy to carry this commitment forward.

And in any order:

Richard Harding – is a lifelong resident of Area 4 and a founder of
the Port Action group focused on violence prevention and connecting
formerly incarcerated people with services and resources. He knows and
cares about the young people and families who most need an educational
system that supports all of our children. I have known Richard for a
long time and hope he is re-elected.

Patty Nolan – I can mainly say that Patty asks the difficult questions
and expects accountability from everyone.

Eleche Kadete – I have not meet this young man who graduated from CRLS
and went on to Brandeis, but I read his platform and on the basis of
that, I’ll vote for him. Here’s a link.

I spent yesterday afternoon being trained to be a warden in the
Cambridge city elections on November 5. It was an unusually tense
training session — normally you want to choose your seat so that
your nap isn’t interrupted by the snores of the person next to
you, because everybody has done everything before, and if the
training didn’t take then, it isn’t going to happen now.

In Cambridge, the city elections are different from the others
because of proportional
representation. As a voter, what this means is that instead
of putting X’s next to the names of the people you want to vote
for, you have to rank the candidates in the order you prefer.

As an election worker, this means you do a lot less of the
total process, since the counting takes place in a computer back
at the election commission, instead of in the scanner and the
various tally sheets at the precinct. But you have to do more
voter education, since a remarkable number of the voters have no
idea that they have to do anything different for this
election.

Of course, this city election takes place every two years, but
it seemed like a longer interval than usual this time, because
we’ve had so many more elections than we used to. I’ve done
special elections and primaries for a state senator and a US
senator, and lots of poeple have also done them for state
representatives, and the primary for the US Representative.

Part of the tension yesterday was that the Election
Commissioner was new and hadn’t ever done this particular
training. Actually, he’s someone who’s done the warden and clerk
job before, so to some extent his answers to questions were more
practical than some of the other commissioners. Example:

Q: Can we tell the voters to use a ruler, so that they
won’t be as likely to vote the same number for two
candidates?

A: You can tell them that, but you can’t yell at them
when they decide not to and spoil their ballot.

But the real reason for the tension I think was one particular
trainee, who I think is insecure about whether she’s doing the job
right, and has found all the training sessions that are exactly
like all the other training sessions very reassuring, and suddenly
this one started out by saying, “Here are some things you have to
do differently for a city election.”

So she freaked out, and it set off a few other insecure
people. In justice to them, some of the material could have been
organized better. For instance, there are two different problems
that are referred to as “overflow” — one is the actual ballot box
physically overflowing, and the other is the memory card in the
scanner running
out of room. This isn’t a problem in a regular election, because
all it has to store is the tallies of how many votes which
candidate got. For proportional representation, it has to store
each ballot separately, because if your first choice candidate
gets “counted out”, the computer back at the election commission
has to be able to find your second choice candidate. In any case,
there was a set of directions about what happens if the memory
card is in danger of overflowing, and 15 minutes later, a second
set of directions about what happens if the ballot box is in
danger of overflowing, and a completely different number of
ballots.

It was a pity the session got so hung up on these technical
issues, because there is an actual voter education problem I’d
like to discuss in that setting some time. When I was first at
the precinct I work at, there were two checkin inspectors who did
a particularly good job of warning the voters that they needed to
fill in numbers instead of marking X’s. Then suddenly one year,
there were brand new inspectors at that table, and we had a lot
more spoiled ballots. I keep trying to remember what the first
two said, and never do.

I like fountains. I live on a street with a world-class
fountain (the Tanner Fountain in front of the Harvard Science
Center) at one end, and what was originally a very good fountain
(“Galaxy: Earth Sphere” by MIT professor Joe Davis) at the
other.

This post is about the Kendall Square end. The original design
had a metal globe in the middle, jets of water spraying on the
globe in summer, steam mists arising around it in winter, and
small globes with different perforation patterns in them
illuminated at night. The globes weren’t as interesting as the
rainbows that form in the mist at the Science center on a sunny
afternoon, but they did change as you walked around them.

This fountain was installed in 1988. For most of the time
since then, it’s been broken.

This
article explains the repairs that resulted in the water flow
being restored after some number of years in 2010. It mentions
that at that time the steam was still broken. No article I’ve
ever seen mentions that the lightbulbs in the small steel globes
have never been replaced (or maybe are just never turned on).

There’s also no mention that the fountain is turned off at
night and on weekends these days. During the day, it is often running at less
than full strength, so that the water streams don’t actually hit
the globe.

My guess is that Boston Properties, which is responsible for
maintaining the fountain, got significant zoning concessions in
return for providing “amenities” to the neighborhood. In my
opinion, it should get no more development permissions until it
has restored this amenity, and is providing it for residents as well
as employees.

I might not have noticed this book if Fox News
hadn’t done an interview
with the author that was widely reported as a failed attempt at a
hatchet job.

I enjoyed the book a lot. This
review in the New York Times, by Dale B. Martin, who is the
Woolsey professor of religious studies at Yale University,
suggests that there’s current scholarship that casts some doubt on
ideas that Aslan presents as facts. But he doesn’t suggest any
books about such scholarship that are as readable as this one.

What makes this especially readable is that the notes are
separate from the texts — Aslan is a college professor, but he
obviously knows that books written by professors for other
professors don’t make the best seller lists. So he writes what he
considers the best guess about the history, and then for each
chapter has a notes section that lists the books he used, and
suggests further reading. (This is the references to other
contemporary writers; the biblical texts are referenced by chapter
and verse in context in the usual way.)

The best part of the book is the description of the politics
and economics of first century Palestine. Anyone’s guesses about
exactly what role the early Christians played in that mess are
clearly open to question, but in this century we really know a lot about how the
Romans, Greeks, Jews and other groups related to each other that
makes the stories in the New Testament make a lot more sense.

I especially liked the description of James the brother of
Jesus. (Aslan does not believe that brother meant half-brother or
cousin. I think I doubted that when the nuns said it in seventh
grade, too.) Here’s the first paragraph of that chapter:

They called James, the brother of Jesus, “James the Just.” In Jerusalem, the city he had made his home after his brother’s death, James was recognized by all for his unsurpassed piety and his tireless defense of the poor. He himself owned nothing, not even the clothes he wore—simple garments made of linen, not wool. He drank no wine and ate no meat. He took no baths. No razor ever touched his head, nor did he smear himself with scented oils. It was said he spent so much time bent in worship, beseeching God’s forgiveness for the people, that his knees grew hard as a camel’s.

His thesis is that Christianity would have become a
very different religion if the Hebrew faction led by James hadn’t been wiped
out by the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 65 C.E, leaving the
Greek faction led by Paul in charge by default. Martin
claims that this description of the early church is
oversimplified, but doesn’t claim that you won’t get the current
complicated view by reading the books in the notes section to that
chapter.

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