WooTube 101 - update

The Woo Tube 101 contest has attracted 13 official entries so far, plus one that I think may have been intended as an entry (next to last in the link list below), but hasn't been added to the Colleges of Worcester Consortium YouTube Favorites list yet.

Here are links to all the videos I've found, so far:

(1-31-10) A PICTURESQUE GLANCE AT THE CITY OF WORCESTER (HD) (Woo Tube 101 Contest)

(1-31-10) Wizards in Worcester

...(2-2-10) Wizards in Worcester - edit

......(2-2-10) COWC Contest

(2-1-10) Exploring Worcester

(2-1-10) Travels With Steve (Woo Tube BWF)

(2-1-10) Worcester Rocks

(2-1-10) Worcester: Why It's Better

(2-1-10) Contest - Worcester Has Heart!

(2-1-10) Welcome to Woo WOOTUBE

(2-2-10) Katerine en Worcester

(2-2-10) Kid Cudi - Soundtrack 2 My Life - COWC Contest

(2-4-10) LEAF_THE_NIGHT

(2-8-10) Worcester: Did you know?

(2-8-10) Welcome To Worcester

Street Light Guys, cont'd

I spotted this orange Thiro truck pulling in to the gas station at Grove and Park this afternoon, just before 1pm.

When I posted about these guys this morning, I thought they were no longer working in town.

But it looks like they're still here.

I'm really tempted to call someone like Bob Moylan or one of the City Councilors and ask whether these guys are working for the city, or for National Grid. The answer to that question would determine which way the story goes... y'know?... the story that Clive didn't have in his column this morning?...

Since I'm not a news reporter, or even a wannabe news reporter, I just can't bring myself to make the call.

It would be so easy to make that transition, though, wouldn't it?..

This orange Thiro truck was part of a two truck crew working on a street light on Hermon Street this afternoon, about twenty past one.

If I had gotten myself a bit more attuned to the city's intention to buy all the street lights, this connection to all the orange Thiro trucks that've been all over the city over the past few months would have been made much sooner.

But, like anything else resembling a work crew on the streets of Worcester... it's just so easy to hardly even notice them.

And like any other really interesting, but unreported story in this town... we might never know what's going on with all of this if the folks who call themselves reporters (and who get paid to be reporters) don't do their jobs.

Build It and They Will Come

I last posted about this new building a month ago.

The main thing that I see here, as opposed to the empty storefront spaces on the Franklin Street side of Union Station, is a private developer.

I would be very surprised if the spaces at Union Station got filled before the spaces in this project get leased out.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

The tunnel in the picture is Franklin Street under the railroad bridge this morning.

Every time I've gotten all the way through it, I get to see the empty storefronts in the new parking garage.

I wonder how long it will be before we see businesses leasing any of those spaces... all of which lie well after the light that's at the end of this particular tunnel.

I'd like to know what market survey results claimed those commercial spaces would be a good idea. I mean, we could at least find out which marketing survey company never to do business with again, at the very least.

I do suspect, though, that no market surveys were done at all, prior to the decision to create these spaces... Never mind finding potential tenants that might be interested, well before the first grant writing exercise even took place.

It's one of the things that I find peculiar about the various tax money supported ventures that come bubbling up to the surface in this town, whether the tax money is local, state, or federal... because all those varied sources of public funding come out of the same pockets. I mean, it's nice to get earmarks and pork wherever you can, but just because the money's there to build something... it doesn't mean anyone will come.

Heh. And when they don't come, additional measures have to be taken to "make it work" somehow.

F'rinstance, they decided that they had to close down the open parking lots at the beginning of Grafton Street to force commuter rail customers to use the new garage... They ended up having to sell the airport after it turned out a big new terminal necessitated jacking up all the airport fees, driving out longstanding tenants and further exacerbating the whole situation... And now there are plenty of rumors making the rounds about them working on getting a new developer to take over CitySquare... since the massive deal crafted by the city that has languished for half a decade made it wiser for Berkeley to, essentially, do nothing but collect rent in order to stay in the black.

It's all part and parcel of the peculiar way the city has been "doing business" during the entire tenure of the current City Dictator. I think he's a nice enough guy... but I do think that it's been a very long tunnel we've gotten ourselves into, here in Worcester, ever since he ascended to the throne.

Will there ever be a light at the end of that tunnel?

Street Light Guys

After reading Clive's column this morning, I knew he had missed something. He's got a bunch of numbers, and he's got the story about the city's planning to buy all the street lights from National Grid.

But he's definitely missed something, and it was right under our noses for several weeks during the latter part of last year. I had seen them around town for quite a while before I finally took a couple of pictures and posted about them here, and here at the beginning of December.

It's the Thiro trucks that, like an armada invading the city, carried new light poles and utility poles to many different sections of the city for several weeks, day in and day out. They replaced light poles and utility poles all over the city, and maybe they even installed some new ones, for all I know...

The key to this story is how this deal between the city and National Grid precipitated the mass replacement of light poles by this outside contractor last year, and whether the city is now being stiffed with the bill. Clive merely skims across the tip of this iceberg in only two sentences: "The deal, however, did not happen (negotiations are ongoing). Moreover, National Grid is increasing the cost of its street lighting services by $650,000 a year."

This looks to me like the longstanding practice of utilities "passing on the cost" of things to the customer. It's not something that I could expect the city to have foreseen in this attempt to "save money" on street lighting, though.

But I'll tell ya: The only way anybody can ever really "save money" on their electric bill is to generate your own electricity. Heh... owning the street lights will never do it in the short term because it doesn't eliminate the burden of profit from the electric delivery system.

There can, however, be a long term benefit to the city owning the street lights if the initiatives are there to look at ways that the city can generate its own electricity. City officials can start right away by paying a visit to one of the most innovative wind power generating companies in the nation... right here in Worcester on Prescott Street.

They can also look at ways to convert the sodium-vapor street lights to LED (or other low power) technology over the coming years, something we never could do if we don't end up owning the street lights. And the tops of every one of those light poles is a great location for small scale sun and wind power generation, too.

Yup... Maybe Clive can look into all of that, too.

The Sarah Palin Tea Party Speech, cont'd

Heh. The gift that just keeps on giving.

The Grapevine

It's gotten to the point where Bill Randell's blog is the best online source of Worcester rumors that end up coming true.

Parking Is Not A Problem

If anyone in Worcester thinks that parking is a problem here, try opening up a restaurant in Portsmouth.

Rhetorical Manipulation

"We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes."

Link

The Sarah Palin Tea Party Speech

Andrew Sullivan liveblogged the speech.

Heh. Some pure gems from Andrew include:

"This is Cheneyism from a fembot. She's impugning the idea that Obama is commander-in-chief."

"The governor who set up private email accounts for state business is now campaigning for transparency."

"The Tea Party keynote speaker wants more tax cuts and no specified spending cuts. This is what created the deficits!"

"Listening to her completely content-free rehash of every Fox News truism..."

Walmart Stuporcenter in the Village

According to the T&G today, the new Walmart in Quinsigamond Village won't be opening up until maybe April.

And the rumors of Sam's Club moving to the same location have turned out to be true, after all.

I have mixed feelings about this new store.

It'll be less than two miles from where I live, so the convenience of being able to take advantage of the lower prices will be very difficult for me to just shrug off.

Nearly everything is cheaper at Walmart.

Exactly why everything is cheaper, though...

Well, there's the rub...

A Big Stink, cont'd

Count me in with the cheering squad that stands behind DPW&P Commissioner Bob Moylan's stance in regard to the way the Clean Water Act of 1975 has been perverted over the years, to the point where the current situation has become completely unviable.

At the beginning of the month I pointed out the most fundamental problem in all of this. But it goes way beyond that simple explanation of the unfunded mandate. Hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal taxpayer squeeze are funneled into the establishment of all sorts of ongoing programs every year that fall under the umbrella of that one magic word: environmental... like maybe additional police forces such as this one, here in Massachusetts, instead of into the funding of the EPA's direct mandates.

This article, from November 2008, for instance, tells us that there are 90 officers in the state's Environmental Police Department... each one with their own pickup truck or SUV fully paid for.

Nice gig, huh?

And they do love their guns... I can just picture one of these guys on a fully loaded ATV with flashing lights, like a wild west cowboy chasing errant bad guys on improperly registered ATV's through the woods, guns blazing... But I guess they have to fight against one or more of the many other police forces in Massachusetts, if it looks like they might have to call off the chase because they're running out of tickets.

It's all so environmental... isn't it?

At any rate, I got off on a tangent with that one tiny sliver of taxpayer funded activity that falls under the umbrella of the magic catch-all taxpayer funded aegis of all things "environmental"... And I'm not particularly anti-environmental police at all... it's just what it is. It's just another police department. But what the hell has that got to do with the very real problems that need to be solved in cleaning up our waterways?

What it's really all about in my eyes is the taxpayer funded EPA, whose budget from 1970 through 2004 looked like this. The 2010 budget for the EPA will be $10.5 billion. I sneezed after I read that article. They're adding a hefty $2.7 billion over last year's budget. The article says, "The new budget will also create jobs. The EPA plans to have enough money to hire 30 additional enforcement staff members in its Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Program."

Oh. Thirty new EPA employees. Wow.

I can understand how Bob Moylan, a particularly reasonable man who's never been noted for having a short fuse, might express anger and frustration in having to deal with the EPA's miserly behavior towards not just our city, but the entire nation. But it's not just the EPA, it's the whole crew down there in DC that gives $1.2 trillion to the Bank/Insurance/Stockbroker giants so they can continue giving out multi-million dollar bonuses every year, while future generations are given $0.0027 trillion to prevent them from drowning in their own sewage.

Grafton High School

There was plenty of coverage for the town meeting in Grafton yesterday, where they voted on whether to build a new $73.4 million High School or not...

The meeting was liveblogged by Jennifer. And then she wrote the article about it in the Grafton Times. Meanwhile, this historic Town Meeting was also covered by the T&G this morning.

Why am I so interested in all of this? I'm a graduate of Grafton High School. My class was the first to go through all three years at the existing high school after it was built.

It's the Grafton Public School system that taught me how to write.