Today's story in the T&G (the fourth in the T&G's six day smear series) is yet another example of how to de-stress and/or completely omit pertinent facts, so that spin can be disguised as "news". Today they're doing their best to de-stress party politics in the State of Massachusetts, while pimping the eleventh hour Democratic Party candidate.
Just keep in mind that this is, essentially, a
one party state.
Not once in today's article will you find the words "democrat" or "republican" or anything about party affiliations, connections, or "camps" even hinted at. They didn't even bother with the requisite "(D)" that should be used to specify which party "Rep. Robert P. Spellane" might belong to in the very first sentence of the article. This wholesale de-stressing and/or complete omission of pertinent facts to spin up a newspaper story is something that the T&G excels at, however. It's especially egregious when they do it in a day by day series like this, too.
I would easily assume that the Republican Party, the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, the Constitution Party, and even the
Hockey Moms of Tatnuck Party and the
Volvo Owners Club of Paxton don't have an eleventh hour candidate to jump into this race
because ...mounting a campaign takes a lot of work, a lot of time, and a lot of fundraising beforehand. In other words, the only eleventh hour candidates that obviously
have all that work behind them are the two Democrats that magically showed up less than 24 hours after the story first "broke" on Sunday.
And now, those two have magically merged into one. Absolutely amazing, isn't it?
Here it is just under a week after all that old news about Spellane "broke" in the paper, and potentially viable non-Dem candidates STILL haven't had enough time to organize, come up with a candidate, or find their way to getting some coverage in the paper.
But the Democrats were able to do all that in
less than 24 hours. And not just for one candidate, but TWO Democrats that were touted by the T&G as running
against each other only a couple of days ago, but who are now
best buddies and have agreed to merge into ONE Democrat vying for Spellane's seat a few days later... Uncanny, isn't it?
Unseating Spellane and just tossing another Democrat into that spot could easily become a
fait accompli, all just because of the precision timing of Sunday's so-called "news" reporting at the T&G. And all this would appear to accomplish is changing the representation for that district from a five term
seniority status to a
freshman status in next year's General Court. In other words, it appears that it won't change a damn thing on Beacon Hill, but it will erase the seniority, and thereby drastically reduce the effectiveness of representation in the 13th Worcester district.
Why? Why would the Democrats want to do
that?
The tacit assumption that nobody at the T&G had any slightest clue about any of the dirt reported on Sunday until "just now" is simply not credible. That a veteran reporter (or anyone else at the T&G, for that matter) was completely oblivious of ANY of the elements of Sunday's supposed "revelations" about Spellane until this past week is simply beyond belief.
The issues concerning Spellane reported on Sunday unfolded over several months, possibly a year or more, before this past weekend. If they had been reported in a timely fashion, back when each item really was "news", then Spellane would have had to either satisfactorily explain to his constituency the balance of the story, or go down in flames
long before this. Timely reporting would have given the voters a chance to understand and digest what actually happened in regard to each separate item, one at a time. And most important of all,
timely reporting of each element as it actually unfolded probably would have
opened the door really wide for a non-Dem candidate surfacing in that district. But lumping all that time into "right now" by completely de-stressing the chronology of the items in Sunday's story, and springing it all upon the public
two weeks before the election like this...
In my eyes, this whole thing just stinks like rotting fish, from end to end. This crap does not "inform the public" at all. The timing and the spin does
exactly the opposite, and THAT is an extreme disservice to the public, as far as I'm concerned.
No matter which way you want to slice this story up, it just doesn't add up to straight, timely, OR complete news reporting.
This is why
I don't trust the T&G. And if I was alone in my distrust, I'd expect that the T&G's revenues
wouldn't be dropping like a rock, month after month, year after year.
The candy is ready.
To postpone All Hallows Eve to All Hallows Day is about as vacuous and uninformed and obtusely lame as it can possibly get!
Apparently, there is nobody in Oxford who is well-schooled enough in history, or even curious enough to wonder where the word "Halloween" came from, to have made any sort of attempt at giving the Oxford Selectmen a heads up on how utterly absurd this is.
I found this house on Mann Street the other day.
Actually, this almost looks like a crime scene... maybe the scene of (good grief!) a crime committed with a knife!
Nearly every Autumn, the great and powerful God of the Prevailing West Winds comes to our house and cleans up the leaves.
This shot shows how the leaves are mostly piled up in the back yard today, as well.
So far, I hadn't done any foliage shots this year.
This is a picture of a house on Lake Ave that's apparently home to at least one very serious Halloween celebrant.
No Sunday column, and today there's no familiar face of Dianne Williamson with a link to her latest column. For the first time since I've ever used the online version of the T&G, there is no sign of Dianne Williamson anwhere up front.
In our last episode of the Worcester Bug Hunt, the death knell was tolling for over 1500 hardwood trees inside the quarantine zone. Now it's over 1700.
Karl Hakkarainen takes on the buffoonery that politicians get into whenever they think they are required to "do something about it" ...in this case, the statistical anomaly of people recently getting stabbed in Worcester. (I like Karl's stuff, he often comes up with some real gems.)
The Halloween decorations for this house on Waverly Street are pretty striking.
If you search for stories like this, you won't have to search very far.
No, it's not a picture from The Exorcist, it's a picture from Terminator 2...
From noon to five pm today, a Benefit for Autism Awareness in memory of Elias Tembenis will be held at the Kas Bar, 234 Southwest Cutoff (Rte 20) in Worcester.
A few days ago, it occured to me that we hadn't been over to the Texas Roadhouse in Lincoln Plaza in a while.
I really can't believe it's been four months since we first chowed down on these ribs, but that's how long it's been since we followed up on a recommendation from Lee (Pink Granite).
Yesterday was Yellow Blitz Day, wherein Registry Cops and local Cops spent the morning and afternoon on the lookout for idiot drivers who endanger the lives of children.
The highly ephemeral nature of the material one might find on the internet often seems exemplified by the unique qualities of whatever software the T&G uses to foist its magical website into our homes and onto our computers. That there are two separate pages for Tuesday's story on "sticker candidates" in the 13th Worcester district is hardly anything I'd consider nefarious, ...just odd. Here's a link to the long version, and here's a link to the short version.
This facade may have once been the entrance to Mass Art.
A "cloudburner" is basically any transmitting antenna that radiates straight up into the clouds.
This is a picture of a simple dipole antenna made out of TV twinlead wire. It's the kind of antenna that you'd tape to your wall in order to better receive your favorite low power or distant FM stations.
That shadowy character in the picture is Shaun Sutner, the writer's writer par excellence.
I searched the T&G site for "Robert P. Spellane" and "Spellane" and I didn't see anything published about this guy's divorce last year, no mention of any problems with his personal finances over the last year... absolutely nothing. Yet, suddenly, the T&G has "discovered" all this shit to write about him... two weeks before the election???
The stock market isn't the only thing going up and down.
When Paul Stacy left this world, a vacancy was left in the heart of the commonwealth that can never be filled again.
The first version of Windows that I tried (but didn't keep) was somewhere down in revision 2.x. It wasn't until version 3.1 that I found it to be of any use at all, ...but I've been upgrading ever since.
Disk Operating System, version 6.x, for instance, is a finished product.
CompuServe was THE place to dial into, back in the late 1980's and early 1990's, before the internet took off and the World Wide Web rolled onto it. Everything was dialup, and there were endless lists of telephone numbers for servers that people had set up in their houses, running bulletin board systems.
They replaced the sewer hookup for the house across the street from me, ...but the main task here was to intall a new bump.
With no higher standard to point to, Bump Installation Crews in Worcester can continue to do this kind of shoddy work, and claim they are working to specifications that call out this particularly crummy method of, supposedly, restoring a road surface.
