I discovered a couple days ago that while there are comments that get posted to my site immediately without moderation, there are some that go into a queue that I have to approve before they appear on the site. I don’t know why some go into the queue and others don’t, frankly, but most of the “comments” that end up in the queue are spams. To be honest, I figured they were all spams and instead of going through them, I periodically deleted the whole bunch without having a closer look.

Well, the other day I had a closer look. The ratio of legitimate comments to spams was something like 1:100, but there were legitimate, thoughtful, even insightful comments in there that would have been deleted had I not taken that closer look. (I still delete the ones that call me names, by the way.)

I wanted to mention this oversight on my part, and to apologize to anyone who may have attempted to post a comment in the past, whose comment never appeared. If you didn’t call me names, it was because I threw it out with the junk mail. I will be more careful from now on. I wouldn’t want to miss any stray compliments, would I?

Ok. That’s it. Carry on.

These two shots were taken from Kingston St., between Bedford and Summer (scroll down for detailed directions–the red “x” marks the spot). The first is looking due west, the second looking southeast. I was right across the street from The Good Life, which is The Place for martinis, apparently, in case you didn’t know. I’m not gonna get into the whole “what is a martini?” debate right now, though. It’s too early in the morning, and I’ve only had three martinis so far. (I need at least five-and-a-half to get philosophical.)

The building in which The Good Life finds itself is utterly charming, by the way:

The closest T station is Downtown Crossing (Red Line), which is .17 miles away. To get here from there, walk approximately 1 block SE on Summer St., turn right on Kingston St., walk a short distance SW on Kingston St., and look up.

Just so you’re clear on this, I consider a “found vista” in the city that open space framed by the structures. One thing I like about Boston–that you can really see in the second shot above, is how unexpectedly, and from just one certain angle on the ground, lines converge.

In that picture–looking SE–what is pleasing, mysterious, titillating even, is the vanishing point between the buildings. Their parallel lines seem to converge in that sliver of open space. There is freedom there, beyond—but it opens up only for a moment. Take two steps in any direction, and it’s gone. Like the shadow of a thought, or the hint of a possibility.

If you’ve discovered a secret vista, send it to me HERE.

HERE.

At least according to MSN.

39th place?!? Are you freaking KIDDING me? That’s PATHETIC! Come on, guys! We can do better! Let’s aim high! Orlando’s #1! WE’VE GOTTA BE ANGRIER THAN ORLANDO! Go out right now and smash something up! Even Indianapolis is ahead of us! Doesn’t THAT make you angry? How about Lubbock, Texas? I’m fightin’ mad about that one, let me tell you!

I figure Deval Patrick has been holding his breath for my endorsement long enough. He can’t turn any bluer, so I might as well just throw in my lot with him now.

Actually I hadn’t seen him in the news too much lately. I was wondering when he’d start running campaign commercials. But in the last couple of days his campaign seems to have kicked into high gear, unveiling two new ones–one that showed him out among the people, and featured tingly words like “hope” and “justice”. Another where he’s addressing the camera directly from in front of a blackboard in a classroom. More “hopes” and “dreams” and lives “transformed” (mainly Deval’s). He gets mildly medieval on the current administration in this one: “It’s not a deficit of dollars,” he says of the “education crisis,” “it’s a deficit of leadership — the failure to ask hard questions and tell the truth.”

This would seem to imply that his Republican opponent, Kerry Healey, the representative of the current administration seeking the governorship, too, has not asked the hard questions or told the truth. You could argue for the first, depending on what you consider to be the “hard questions” to be, but I think the second is a stretch, and I’ll tell you why.

I don’t think the truth is a big issue for Republicans, first of all. Healey’s positions would certainly “evolve,” just as Romney’s have while in office.

Neither Romney nor Healey is a leader. Both are managers, and managers are interested in the bottom-line, and they will change their management strategy according to whose bottom-line they’re paying attention to.

For her part, Kerry Healey’s latest ad characterizes her opponents as traditional “tax-and-spend” liberals, and then there’s a bit of fluff about how she will spend your money on “things like education.” And who could object to that?

What rings particularly hollow with Healey is the promise to “suspend the gas tax,” which is something no one’s all that interested in. Even the President recognizes America has an oil addiction. “With a billion dollar surplus,” she claims in one ad, “we can afford it.” Well, if we’ve got such a big-ass surplus, why not put some of it into transit-oriented development? Maybe make alternatives to automobiles a feasible alternative for people. I mean, two of her, like, four campaign promises have to do with making driving a car cheaper.

None of the Healey’s opponents are fool enough to propose new taxes, by the way. And none have mentioned our supposed billion dollar surplus. (I don’t know where this figure comes from, actually–The Mass. Budget and Policy Center puts the surplus at $120 million–if anyone has insight on this, please share.)

Healey wants it both ways here. She wants to say, on the one hand, that when she came into power four years ago, as she told channel 4’s Jon Keller, “things were very tough; we were having an economic downturn.” But now we have this billion dollar surplus, according to her. So why are we still experiencing “the big squeeze,” as she calls it in her ad? That’s the question, isn’t it?

She is literally the poster child for her own administration’s lack of effectiveness. She’s trying to court the very people her own administration could not help, by her own admission, over the past four years. It’s the legislature’s fault? OK, so how is she going to be any more effective in dealing with it than Romney’s been? And Romney had a lot more impressive management experience than Healey when he came to office.

But back to Deval. What he’s got that Healey doesn’t is precisely “hope.” And that’s what separates leadership, particularly on the executive level, from management. Managers strategize and build systems, leaders inspire and motivate people. And don’t underestimate the power of inspired and motivated people. The Healey camp says, leave it to us. We’ll manage it for you. Deval says “together, we can.”

The question for Deval is, can he leverage his charisma to convince the legislature to make changes once in office? But even if he can’t, he starts out in a stronger position than Healey. He at least has the charisma to begin with.

If you have some horror stories about T etiquette to share, and I know you do, drop me a line HERE. I’ll make you famous.

After their team’s recent manhandling by the Yankees, Sox fans are starting to suspect they’ve been cursed again. But they’ve got it all wrong. Yes, they’re back to being the Yankees’ bitches, but this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In fact, being a bitch can be fun! I say, stop whining about it. Embrace your inner bitch, Sox Nation!

The truth is, that World Series win put the pressure on. And it started to dawn on Sox Nation that it’s not easy being the alpha dog. Not to say that it’s necessarily easy to lie on your belly with your bum in the air taking it from the alpha dog, either. But it’s hard for different reasons.

What’s happened here is pretty simple, actually. Sox Nation is having a bout of performance anxiety. It’s not a curse. Counseling is often very effective. It happens when you’ve been a bottom all your life and then all the sudden you’re expected to turn around and play the top. And just because you did it once in 86 years doesn’t make you Jeff Stryker. But that’s OK. What if everyone in the world was Jeff Stryker? Well, it’d be pretty boring.

Sure, once in a while it’s fun to pretend. Sometimes you pretend so good it almost seems real. But once you’ve shot your wad, the doubts start crowding in, the anxiety, the little voices. You can’t think with both heads at once, guys.

Let’s look at the facts here. It was mere hours after the Sox won the World Series in ‘04 that the hand-wringing began. They won on the 27th of October, and by the 29th there was an article in the New York Times (I know, I know, but bear with me, here) entitled “With Nothing Left to Win, Fans of Red Sox Suddenly Feel a Loss.” This was only the first in a slew of articles to detail the incipient stages of the coming identity crisis for fans.

“It didn’t take long to go from ecstatic to existential,” the article opened, quoting one devoted fan (who happens to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning expert on genocide at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard): “A team that loses in some ways is going to be easier to identify with for most Americans than one that wins. Are we going to become that which we can never imagine being? Are we winners now, and does that make us sort of less empathetic, less humble? That’s what being on the other side of the jackboot for 86 years leaves people able to do. Yankee fans don’t feel for what we’ve gone through. Are we going to become like them?”

(This from a woman who had just returned from Darfur where she was investigating reports of genocide—luckily she was able to hear the game on web radio while she was in Africa conducting her research.)

Anyway, in the World Series victory (and the reverse of the curse) she saw “a chance for a city to lighten up by removing its chip. ‘Maybe it will just become about a baseball rivalry instead of a humiliated city,’ she said. ‘It could make baseball less about the meaning of life and more about just baseball.’ And, she said, almost as if to reassure herself, ‘that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.’”

Well, no such luck.

Like I said, this was only the very first stirrings of panic in Sox Nation. But once again, it’s reaching a “fever pitch,” if you will. It turns out Sox fans didn’t know how to be winners, after all. But then maybe it’s not really about winning or losing in the final analysis. I know you’re accustomed to looking at this as a rivalry, but, really, it’s a relationship. And this was, well, a little role-reversal. It’s healthy. It can be fun once in a while. Spice things up!

But you have to be prepared to be out of your comfort zone, and Sox Nation wasn’t. At first it was liberating, but soon Sox Fans were scared. Who were they now? What was expected of them? Could they continue to play the role convincingly? With those little voices in their head whispering their doubts? They held it together respectably for awhile, but their latest repeated impalement on the great Yankee beef bayonet has brought all those fears to the fore.

What is needed here is an intervention.

Sox Nation could learn alot from Cesar Millan (the “dog whisperer”), and gay sex. Here’s how:

First Cesar Millan. One episode of “The Dog Whisperer” dealt with this little fluffy white dog–I think its name might even have been Fluffy–but he acted more like Kujo. Cesar quickly diagnosed the problem: the dog was being forced to be the alpha, when he wasn’t really alpha material. And all the stress of being made to act like an alpha was making him cranky, and he snapped at everyone at the least provocation.

Sound familiar, Sox fans?

Once the trouble was diagnosed and appropriate measures taken, everyone was much happier. Fluffy no longer felt pressured to act like something he wasn’t, and his mood changed entirely. Placid, loving, full of puppylike joy. The lesson here: not everyone’s an alpha, and not everyone has to be.

OK, so. What could Sox Nation learn from The Joy of Gay Sex?

Well, first of all, in gay life there are “tops” and there are “bottoms”. Sometimes, to be cute, gay guys refer to their roles as “pitcher” and “catcher,” respectively (there are also those who claim to be “versatile,” or “switch-hitters,” but let’s keep this simple).

Gay guys know that when boys get to balling, whether it’s baseballing or any other kind of balling, they can’t all always be pitchers. Someone’s got to play catcher, too. Sure, pitchers get the prestige, but if you want to know where the real power lies…there was a letter to the editor in the Globe today that sort of sums it up:

“LOST IN all the gloom over the Red Sox’ swift collapse has been the evidence to answer that most perplexing of baseball questions: Who is the league’s Most Valuable Player? With all due respect to Big Papi and Derek Jeter, the MVP for 2006 is now abundantly clear: catcher Jason Varitek. The Red Sox captain would appear to be worth about 50 wins a season to this year’s version of the Sox, as their 60 percent winning percentage has dropped by half in the month since he was injured. Those of us who bemoaned his inconsistent hitting early in the year now understand his true value to the team, especially to its young pitchers who have lost all confidence without his leadership.”

Just like the wikipedia article on “bottoming” says: “The terms ’submissive’ or ‘passive’ have been used for ‘bottom,’ though these may be confusing as the sex in question needn’t be part of a dominance relationship, nor is the bottom necessarily any less ‘active’ than the top.”

See, there’s no shame in being a bottom, Sox fans. In fact, methinks you all protest too much. The fact is, the man who can take a good, er, drubbing from another man might actually be the bigger of the two. But you’ve got to relax, loosen up a little, if you want to enjoy it. And take it like a man, for pete’s sake! All this hand-wringing and these bouts of out-and-out hysteria every time you do what comes natural’s getting old. There’s no shame in being a macho bitch, Sox Nation, it’s the whiny bitches we’ve all had it up to here with.

HERE.

I had to comment on a couple stories I saw on TV this morning.

One was on The Early Show on CBS, where Harry Smith interviewed a woman who sat several rows in front of John Mark Karr, the sad clown in the never-ending JonBenet Ramsey circus, on his flight back to the US.

(I think Karr’s real motive is to finally get his sex-change operation–he’s hoping, like foxy Michelle Kosilek, formerly Robert Kosilek, who’s serving a life-sentence for killing his wife, that once in prison the taxpayers will foot the bill for it.)

The somehow aptly-named Natasha Fagel (who looked like she’d fenagled her share of bagels), that random passenger who happened to be on the same flight as Karr and looks nothing like a six year old beauty queen (except maybe for the teased hair, rouge, and tiara she was sporting for the interview), says she didn’t know who he was until after she deboarded, but when she found out… she was terrified. Sort of retro-terrified, I guess you’d call it.

Could this be any more pathetic? Not only is she retro-terrified, but she is retro-terrified of John Mark Karr. People. Please. Unless you’re six, you have nothing to fear.

The other story was on the hipper, always acronymized GMA. They played a YouTube video (”Fireman in a Spin“) of a fireman who had climbed into a frontloading clothes drier and had his buddies turn it on.

You couldn’t even see what was going on in the video, really, but all four hosts were sitting on their big ugly couch snickering at it, for some reason. I could not for the life of me figure it out. I mean, morning shows are only minimally informative–so it’s not like I was expecting hard news during the segment–but this was not even remotely entertaining. I mean, you want to see something really funny? Check out this hilarious YouTube video! Now, that’s entertainment!

The funny thing about YouTube is it actually just struck a joint-marketing deal with NBC. According to CNET, “NBC has plans to upload promotional video clips of some of its TV shows, including ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.’ The entertainment company, owned by General Electric, will advertise on YouTube and promote the site on some of its TV shows. Financial details were not disclosed.”

But thank goodness we can look forward to more quality content like “Man Thinks He’s a Cat” and “Fireman in a Spin”! (By the way, only as an afterthought did the giggling hosts at GMA caution, “kids: don’t try this at home!”–I see a future tragedy unfolding.)

As for NBC. They couldn’t compete with the business class passenger sitting three rows in front of the cross-dressing pedophile, and they certainly could not match a fireman in a drier. In desperation Today did a piece on “female sex-drive,” and how it “plummets” after marriage.

Of sex in marriage, one woman said, “after awhile it gets a little boring.”

Ladies. I want to clear something up. Just for the record. Guys don’t do it because it’s particularly interesting. I mean, the average duration of coitus is 7.9 minutes with 100 to 500 thrusts per encounter. There’s really not much time, what with all that thrusting, to make it all that interesting for you. Sorry. Look at it like this: eight minutes of friction, and you’re free for the rest of the day!

Yikes. HERE.