Connecticut
Post posts about what is happening in the State of Connecticut.
Bernie and Me
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/30/2009 - 09:21This morning, I turned off the radio’s morning news program as I drove my daughter to summer camp. I’ve heard enough about Bernie Madoff. It was time to talk with my daughter. Off to the left a man was mowing part of the town golf course. The town bought the golf course earlier this year when it went into bankruptcy and has been doing a great job of bringing it back to life. I, too, have suffered economic hardships over the past couple years, but today, the sun was shining and Fiona was ready for camp.
This year, Fiona is attending the Woodbridge Recreation Department’s summer camp. It takes place at the local elementary school. The little island at the beginning of the school’s driveway was festooned with beach balls and a man sitting in a beach chair waving at each incoming camper. Brightly colored traffic cones provided a path for me to follow to another traffic island where Fiona jumped out of the car and was met by a camp counselor. “What group are you in?” she asked.
Fiona promptly replied, “Pumpkins” and the counselor whisked Fiona off to her group as I drove back home. We are now living in a small rented house in Woodbridge. Life has been hard for me. Years ago, I worked full time on Wall Street and that took its toll. Later today, I will go to the doctor to make sure that the current batch of medications is keeping my blood pressure in check. I will get some writing done, a little bit of consulting, and I’ll look out my office window at the trees, the rock outcropping and the wind chimes. I’ll take a break to pick up Fiona from camp, and we’ll both do chores to keep our home life in order.
Perhaps I should be working harder to get back the large Wall Street salaries I had years ago. I could work long hours, be miserable all the time, but my daughters could do more than just go to a municipal summer camp. On the other hand, the specter of Bernie Madoff looms, reminding us all of many great lessons in life. So many people lost so much investing with Madoff. It is a reminder not to store up our treasure on earth where thieves break in and steal. Madoff himself is a reminder. Would he have run his great scheme if he had thought that it would end him up with 150 year prison sentence; forever staining his name? I suspect many people bend the rules as much as they think they can get away with in their lust for worldly goods.
Today, I watched my daughter gleefully go off to join her group at the town summer camp. I don’t have $2.5 million of ill earned wealth left over after a scandal the way Ruth Madoff does. She can keep her $2.5 million as she watches her husband head off to jail. I’ll be much happier skipping spending $2.50 for a fancy cup of coffee on my way home from seeing my daughter off to camp.
7th Tir, Health Care and the Citizens Election Program
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/28/2009 - 09:03#iranelection #gr88 #neda - Today is the 7th Tir in Iran. It is a day of remembering the death of Ayatollah Dr. Seyyed Mohammad Hosseini Beheshti, who was killed on this day in 1981. Today, there will be a demonstration at Tehran’s Ghoba mosque to honor Ayatollah Beheshti. At least that is ostensibly who the demonstration will be honoring, but many people there may be honoring Neda Agha-Soltan, the martyr of the new 2009 demonstrations in Iran.
The violence against the people in Iran is a stark reminder of how difficult it is to wrest power from incumbents. It can also serve as a warning to those supporting new leaders fighting to come into power. It reminds me of the line from the SDS in the sixties, “We will become like you” and it makes me think about the great quote from Animal Farm, “All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.”
Perhaps this is the message of the current leadership in Iran. “All Islamic Laws are created equal, but some are more equal than others.”
Yet the protests in Iran are not just some drama that we are watching online. They can tell us a little bit about what is going on in our own country. On June 24th, Common Cause issued a report, Legislating Under the Influence. It notes that Major health care interests have spent $1.4 million per day this year lobbying Congress. Where is that money coming from? It is coming from the premiums that you and I pay. While this is much less graphic than the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, it brings to mind the lyrics from Woody Guthrie’s song Pretty Boy Floyd,
Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.
It isn’t just in the national dialog that we see incumbents fighting to hold on to their power. Rep. Corky Mazurek, D-Wolcott introduced an amendment to the budget bill on Friday that would have eliminated the Citizens Election Fund claiming that the money could be spent in much better ways.
Others were quick to observe that Rep. Mazurek narrowly won re-election after fighting off a challenge from a candidate that would not have been able to run if it weren’t for the Citizens Election Fund. Personally, I would much rather have our campaigns sponsored by the citizens of your state than by the major health care interests, and others with a vested interest in holding on to power which is perhaps not all that different from the interest of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Staycation and the Cost of Jam in Connecticut
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 06/25/2009 - 12:23Tuesday, my seven year old daughter and I went strawberry picking in Connecticut. It was the day after her last day of school and one of the few mornings not marred by rain. I had been trying to find the best day and it looked like this was it. A search of the web led me to either Jones Farm, Bishop’s Orchard or Lyman’s Farm. Each had a 24x7 hotline where you can check the days available for picking, the prices and other information. The prices and times varied a little bit. Jones Farm cost more than Bishops or Lyman’s but is closer to where I live, so unless I picked more than twenty three pounds of strawberries, when you factor in the price of gas, it was the least expensive. Lyman’s might well have been even cheaper, but you needed to add in the price of the berry basket there and I wasn’t up for that level of calculations. After all, Jones’ Farm is a pleasant drive and a pleasant place to pick.
Their berry patch is not far from a wonderful orchard where we buy our cider in the fall and Fiona wanted to stop there to pick up some fresh cider. However, they were closed and it led to a good discussion about which crops are in season when and how it is always best to try and eat local food in season whenever possible.
We’ve normally gone to Jones’ Farm on the busiest of picking days and it was quite a contrast to enter a nearly empty parking lot. We walked out to the fields and started picking on our assigned row. The berries were bountiful and in less than an hour, we had picked more than eighteen pounds. My extroverted daughter struck up a conversation with just about everyone within hearing distance and there were several other families picking berries and planning to make jam.
At home, I ran out to pick up sugar, lemons and canning jars and we proceeded to use about half the berries. The recipe that we used called for four cups of smashed strawberries, four cups of sugar and a half cup of lemon juice. I hulled the strawberries and handed them to Fiona who put them in a four quart measuring cup and smashed them with a potato masher. We sanitized the canning jars in the dishwasher and cooked up the jam on the stove top. After all the work of the project, we ended up with the equivalent of about eighteen eight ounce jars of jam.
Doing some back of the envelop calculations, the materials for the jam costs about half as much as a typical jar of jam in a local grocery store. However, that is a misleading calculation in many ways. When you include the cost of labor, the jam probably costs twice as much. If you factor in the costs of the jam that we’ve given away to family and friends it becomes even more prohibitive.
On the other side of the equation, I don’t mean to brag, but I think the jam is orders of magnitude better than typical store bought jam. More importantly, the money we spent in Shelton stays in the local economy. The farm gets some of the money. Some of that goes to the folks working at the farm which will hopefully also stay in the local economy. While there was some fuel burnt in driving to the farm, there wasn’t the fuel burnt in having the jam shipped from Ohio. Perhaps most importantly, Fiona and I had a wonderful day together. She learned more about the joy of picking fresh berries and making jam; experiences and lessons that will serve her well in the years to come.
What Do You Get from Social Media? Ice Cream, Strawberries, Concerts and Transparency
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 06/18/2009 - 09:06Plenty of people have written blog posts about why they blog. It might be to make money, to stay in touch with family and friends, to convince other people of certain opinions, or, the writer’s answer, because they must. However, not a lot seems to be written about why people read other people’s blogs. A comment on a blog post yesterday made me stop and think about this a little bit more.
In response to my blog post, Sky of Blue, and Sea of Green – The New Normal #iranelection, Maria from Maria Michelle's Furkids and Animal Rescue commented about how my post had gotten her thinking about how our lives change.
I believe I first came across Maria’s blog through EntreCard. EntreCard is a site where you can list your blog and find other participating blogs. You have a card that you display on your site, and you drop your card on other participating sites. One of the biggest criticisms of EntreCard is that people ‘drop and run’. They find the place to drop their card, and move on without looking closely at the site they’ve visited. I’ll admit that I often just skim a page before moving on.
Looking at the statistics on my site, the average EntreCard visitor spends 38 seconds on my site, and I suspect that is higher than for many people because my site is slow at loading. 95% of them look at the site and move on without looking at anything else and 60% of them are people that have visited my site.
With that, it is tempting to abandon EntreCard if all you are looking for is more (and perhaps better) traffic. Yet my recent blog post has gotten Maria thinking, and her Monday Grump Tests often bring a smile to my face, so I thought I’d explore a little bit more what I get out of what I read in social media.
A friend in a neighboring town last year tweeted about Rich Farm Ice Cream Shop in Oxford, CT which has become a favorite place to get ice cream for our family. It think it was either from him, or from someone that he introduced me to online that I learn that They Might Be Giants was putting on a free concert on the New Haven Green, which I attended with my family.
Then, today, I read someone’s blog post about going strawberry picking. (I apologize for not remembering the blog and providing a link. If you think it was your blog, leave me a comment). It seems like every August we end up talking about how it would have been great to have gone strawberry picking, but we didn’t think about it until after the season was over. Well, at least here in Connecticut, it is peak strawberry picking season, and if we can get a decent day and people are healthy enough, we will visit one of the local strawberry fields.
So, one important theme is getting more closely connected with things going on around us. I like it when social media helps me do that.
Another important theme is getting better information. Hopefully, some of my blog posts, whether they be about local school board meetings, bills being considered at the State Capitol, or developments in Iran will help people be a little better informed, and again, a little more involved. I know that my technology related posts get a lot of traffic and I hope that they help others figure out how to solve some technological problem. I know that other people’s posts about how they solved technical problems has often helped me immensely.
With that, I would like to highlight a few different blog posts and other sites that help share information that I think it is important to help get out. First, I want to point to a blog post on DailyKos. I am much less involved with DailyKos than I used to be for a large variety of reasons, but I think Adam Siegel posts, Michele's Snapping Some Peas captures a wonderful mix of the local action, especially in the gardens, as it relates to the national stage.
Over on the Sunlight Foundation blog, Clay Johnson has a great blog post about how they are going to bid Recovery.gov.
We together-- not just we meaning The Sunlight Foundation-- are going to bid on redoing Recovery.gov to learn more about the process of government contracting, and to try and build what is perhaps the biggest federal transparency-related website.
I learned about this from Steven Clift at e-democracy.org and think it is a wonderful idea. I hope I can find some time to join the discussion about that idea.
Taking transparency even further, I received an email from Talking Points Memo about how they, together with Pro Publica and the New York Times, have received a Knight Foundation Grant to start documentcloud.org which “will make original source documents easy to find, share, read and collaborate on, anywhere on the Web”. Another very interesting project, that might fit very nicely with the Sunlight Foundation project.
So, these are a few things that I’ve gotten from social media recently. What do you get from social media? I’m especially interested in finding out from everyone on EntreCard or Adgitize that visits my site and then moves on.
Exploring the Death Penalty: The case of Richard Roszkowski and Holly and Kylie Flannery
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 06/11/2009 - 20:13Last week in Bridgeport, the trial of Richard Roszkowski, convicted of two counts of capital felony and three counts of murder entered the penalty phase. If he is given the death penalty, he will become the 11th person on death row in Connecticut. The same week, Gov. Rell vetoed a bill to repeal the death penalty in Connecticut.
Gov. Rell’s veto was covered by hundreds of news stories. Dr. Petit, whose wife and two daughters were brutally murdered has received a lot of press. Mr. Roszkowski’s trial received by but a few stories.
People have suggested that this illustrates the uneven application of the death penalty. The murder of the wife and daughters of a doctor gains much more notoriety than the murder of the girlfriend of a career criminal and her daughter.
One trial lawyer, upon hearing about my interested in the death penalty suggested that I attend some of the trial and perhaps provide additional coverage. So, today, I attended part of the hearing. Read on to get my experience.
