No major predictions here (our crystal ball is on the fritz) but it’s probably safe to assume the incumbents are all going to return to office. It’s hard to defeat someone already in office during a controversial election, never mind a boring one. We predict all four at-large incumbents will return, despite the good intentions of Lafuente and Berman. Ward 5 looks to be the closest race in the city; Ward 6 and Ward 7 will see both incumbents return to office and the sticker one in Ward 4 will be close. Fortunately or unfortunately we see no surprises. We wish everyone the best!
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Congratulations to our own Boston Red Sox for making it a great October here in Red Sox Nation, now we can all focus on the Pat’s and watch those Celtics come alive after 15 years of basketball misery. Speaking of the Sox, there was a Champion sighting at Melo & Son’s on Cross Street last week, seems like David Ortiz was spotted dropping off an Antique Chair to be done over.
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The Somerville Little League will be holding its annual meeting to elect members of the Board of Directors for the 2008 season. The meeting is scheduled for this Thursday, Nov. 1. All members in good standing are encouraged to attend the general meeting, to be held at the Stop & Shop public conference room, in East Somerville.
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Yesterday the VNA (Visiting Nurse Association) broke ground for their new complex up at the old Conwell School site. They will build 90 new units of affordable housing and the Somerville Housing Authority, headed by Joe Macaluso, and his great staff will add 90 more new units in a complex right next door.
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Don’t miss the annual Fall Bazaar at the Little Sisters of the Poor coming up on Nov. 10 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at their home on Highland Avenue. You can find many great things from homemade pastries and Christmas gifts to their homemade and famous Beef Stew. All are welcome to begin their Christmas Shopping season and of course to help the Little Sisters raise some money.
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Elections are this coming Tuesday, and although its a relatively quiet election season we certainly hope that everyone remembers to go out and vote. There will be a lot of activity in Ward 4 with the sticker campaigns of Jamie Norton and Charlene Harris, we know that Jamie will have stickers at the polls for everyone, we assume Charlene will as well, we certainly hope that one of them gets elected so the city won’t have to put up $25 to $30 grand for a special election. They need over 100 stickers or write-ins each to be counted to be eligible to win.
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The Central Hill Memorial Park will be getting a complete make over funded by a State grant with the blessings of the Governor’s office! Somerville is slated to receive $500K for the renovation project. Did you know Central Hill was the city’s first public park?
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November 3 from 4 to 7 Union Square Acupuncture will hold an open house. All are welcome to attend and enjoy appetizers, beverages and discount coupons for acupuncture, massage and Reiki. Call 617-718-7555 to learn more.
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Another holiday event coming up this Friday Nov. 2 at Somerville Hospital from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The Somerville Hospital Ladies Auxiliary will hold their event, these fine and often unheralded ladies put in thousands of hours volunteering at the hospital every year. We say bravo!
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You can have a great night out at “Soul Responsibly”, a fundraiser for RESPOND a group working to end domestic violence against women. The night of fun and 70s music will be held at Dilboy Post on Summer Street this Friday Nov. 2 beginning at 9 p.m., the cover charge will be $10.00. There will be a silent auction, entertainment and raffles.
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Another successful year of ArtsUnion has ended. The Somerville Arts Council and Union Square Main Streets worked together to put on some great events (our favorite was the disco under McGrath Highway) that brought some great attention to Union Square. This series is making Union Square a destination point and highlights some great features of the square. Good job ArtsUnion!
Yeah, but there's not exactly a huge amount of advertising here to make money from those hits.
Posted by: Ron Newman | November 02, 2007 at 08:41 PM
What are you talking about Ron? There was a penalty, I-Not got banned. JN is the judge and jury. And yes it does contribute to civic discourse, as you post more than all of us put together!
Posted by: somerville guy | November 02, 2007 at 08:55 PM
Actually, Tor never charges a fee. If you are using a service that says they are charging a fee to use the open source, completely volunteer and free Tor network, please contact me at Shava -at- torproject.org, as you are getting ripped off badly, and we want to know about it.
Some services use the Tor *client* to connect to a private network. There are a lot of security papers which show why using the Tor network with a privately owned proxy VPN is less secure, but the easiest proof is that there's one point of failure for your privacy -- the people you pay money to.
Depends on why you want anonymity, I suppose, and how badly you want it.
Betcha didn't know that the Tor offices were in Somerville for quite some time...:)
However, as a privacy policy professional, I have to agree with Ron. *Pseudonymity* is more important to civic engagement, for most people, than *anonymity*.
This site isn't technically anonymous -- the paper tracks your IP number, and if you were really abusive, they could have the police order your ISP to give up your personal information. So you can be tracked.
Far more important to civic engagement is *pseudonymity* -- where a person can be tracked by the quality of his/her discourse across multiple discussions. This is vital -- even our founding fathers published leaflets to organize folks around the Revolution here using pseudonyms.
When a person can log in with another person's name, they can mar their reputation and ruin the trust of the community in an otherwise blameless poster.
So if the paper is trying to encourage civic engagement, they are giving people neither anonymity (untrackability by IP), nor pseudonymity (using username/password authentication to protect individual posters' reputations).
I have no idea why they do this, except that they must want to encourage flamewars and people snarking by posting by one another. Maybe the editor finds that amusing?
Yrs,
Shava Nerad
Tor Project Volunteer
Clarendon Hill Neighborhood
Cambridge refugee, in Somerville seeking real neighbors
Posted by: Shava Nerad | November 03, 2007 at 04:45 AM
Well another election year is here and the dirty politics continue to thrive. It's unbelievable how someone who just moved to this city approximately 3 years ago and obviously doesn't have her facts straight goes on an all out attack on an incumbent that was born and raised here. She (Heller)has no clue about what (Trane) has done for this city and especially Ward 7. What I found most disturbing is the sneaky way she went about this "smear campaign". She got at least one individual possibly more to go out after 11:30 p.m. and drop off flyers to people in the neighborhood; that took many statements out of context from different sources. By the way whoever thought up this idea was very weak in the way it was presented.
Ms. Heller do we really need to add more housing to an already jammed city? Everyone seems to be all on top of affordable housing, my question is affordable to whom? Smoke and mirrors!
Posted by: Vote Today | November 06, 2007 at 04:12 PM