Gripes for a Wednesday Afternoon
Oct 2 – Sometimes during the day-to-day business of alerting people to what’s coming up at City Hall or trying to inform voters about the candidates in the upcoming election, there are some things that deserve comment that don’t necessarily fit comfortably in any specific category. I guess these would have to simply be called Gripes. So… at the risk of offending a few people, here are a few Gripes for a Wednesday Afternoon:
1) I’m getting kind of sick of reading letters submitted to the Cambridge Chronicle (and elsewhere) that are OBVIOUSLY generated by people associated with current political campaigns. If the campaign staff and workers of a particular candidate want to place a political advertisement in a local paper, shouldn’t they pay the going rate and include the phrase "Paid Political Advertisement"?
2) Has anyone taken notice of the fact that the parking skills of Cambridge car drivers have plummeted lately? The law requires that cars not be parked more than a foot from the curb, yet I routinely see cars parked several feet from the curb. When was the last time a parking control officer tagged a vehicle for parking like an idiot? Dishonorable mention goes to those drivers who don’t understand the meaning of the word "parallel" in the phrase "parallel parking".
3) A special award should be issued to all of the novice cyclists on Hubway bikes now occupying the street like molecules in a hot gas. Not a day goes by without encountering at least one of these characters either drifting across a busy street without looking or careening wrong-way down a bike lane.
4) Tonight I’ll be attending yet another "Net Zero" event. It amazes me how quickly some local activists who never paid any attention to environmental concerns suddenly "got religion" on global warming when they realized it could potentially be used to block new commercial and residential development in Cambridge.
Perhaps I should make this a regular Wednesday "Hump Day" tradition. Anyone else have some gripes? – Robert Winters
I like the idea, go for it.
Comment by Liza Paden — October 2, 2013 @ 3:17 pm
Hubway is akin to zipcar, if you see one just approach the situation knowing 1) the person operating the vehicle most likely doesn’t know how to operate the vehicle and 2) they know as much about the rules of the road as one could learn in the seconds it took for them to secure said vehicle online.
I like the idea of gripe filled Wednesday it may be just what the doctor ordered.
Comment by Patrick Barrett — October 2, 2013 @ 10:56 pm
One more late gripe – activists who invent fiction, post their fiction on various blogs, and then present their fiction at candidate forums as truth.
Comment by Robert Winters — October 3, 2013 @ 9:40 am
The clear “I approved this message” letters popping up these days are getting ridiculous. It’s almost like they came out of the same political mad-libs book: “I, [name], support [candidate] because they are [adjective], [adjective], and have great knowledge of [latest cambridge buzzword]”
And as for parking – you haven’t seen anything until you see the bang up job my landlord tries to pull off every day. Earlier this year he got his own handicapped spot in front of the building (the only reason being he hates people taking “his” spot when he leaves during the day – he admitted to me that he doesn’t need it) and then procedes to park either a foot or two away from the curb or he takes up a good chunk of space behind the sign pole by parking halfway into the spot.
I am so glad glad I didn’t bother going to the event last night….
Comment by Joseph "Slugs" Aiello — October 3, 2013 @ 10:37 am
The MCNA candidates forum wasn’t entirely horrible. There was some interesting back-and-forth between candidates who knew what they were talking about and those who were clueless. I didn’t sit through what all the candidates had to say, but several who held their own were (by last name) Benzan, Cheung, Kelley, Leslie, Maher, McGovern, Vasquez, Seidel, Smith, Simmons, and Toomey. I’m sure others had their good moments, but these were the ones I heard.
The dispute I have with the MCNA is that their topics and questions were very biased and, in my opinion, chosen with the intention of promoting particular candidates. I don’t think it succeeded, by the way, in part because a number of the candidates forcefully disagreed with the premise of many of the assertions doled out by the moderators at the individual tables.
Comment by Robert Winters — October 3, 2013 @ 3:50 pm