Month: June 2006

Geno’s has instituted an English-only cheesesteak-ordering policy.

As a mitigating factor, “Vento said his staff is glad to help non-native speakers order in English and has never turned someone away because of a language barrier.”

Does Geno’s have any bilingual workers? If both customer and worker speak the same language, doesn’t it slow down business to force them to translate their order into English?

The article only talks about language problems vis-a-vis immigrants; what about foreign tourists?

And what, exactly, is the point of this policy, anyway?

Local radio personality Tom “Mr. Hetero” Crouse says he will support the impeachment of President Bush if the UN grants NGO status to 2 gay rights groups with US support.

KK: I wish Tom Crouse would move to Worcester.

Mike: Yeah! I don’t think of him as being my nemesis or anything.

KK: He’s my entertainment.

Mike: Yes! Exactly!

In case you think Crouse is a fool, check out his latest:

I would be someone who would be considered his political base, and I am not buying it. I do not believe the President cares about a marriage amendment. If he did there would have been a constant drumbeat for one, like we have heard from him on other issues that he really cares about, like making the tax cuts permanent. As a supporter of the President I am disappointed with his transparent effort to pander to a base that for the most part left him a long time ago.

Mr Nemeth, in Sunday’s T&G:

When the South Middlesex Opportunity Council took over PIP in early 2004, it unveiled a master plan: Downsize and eventually relocate the wet shelter on Main Street — a move critics have demanded all along — and serve recovering clients in five halfway houses and lodging facilities. That plan ran into vociferous opposition, fueled by fear, distrust and self-serving politicians. The turning point came when state Sen. Harriette L. Chandler abruptly stripped $200,000 in state funding she helped to secure for a group home for women SMOC planned to open on Catharine Street after she learned the facility would be shifted to a middle-class neighborhood on the West Side. Such punitive action by a nice liberal Democrat made attacks on social service providers not only acceptable, but respectable. It was no longer just neighborhood demagogues, such as Billy Breault, who went after SMOC.

Then there was the Mayor’s Social Service Task Force with proposals on how to lighten the burden social services place on the city. The Research Bureau issued a report with the same aim. The city conducted a silly, and ultimately fruitless, billboard campaign to eradicate panhandling. There is now a bill in the Legislature to regulate social service providers. However, none of these reforms calls for viable action to eradicate the source of the problem: homelessness, hunger, substance abuse and mental illness.

Rep. Robert P. Spellane, co-chairman of the mayor’s task force, chimed in with blatant fear-mongering. He announced that PIP seriously endangered the Main South neighborhood because 13 convicted sex offenders are being “warehoused” at the shelter. SMOC refuted the charge as “irresponsible,” which did not stop Mr. Breault from parroting them on television.

The message of Real Solutions has been that open discussion about our responsibility to the poor, and the pros and cons of social service programs, has been derailed by “fear, distrust and self-serving politicians.” Nice to see a similar opinion in print.

On an unrelated note, check out this ad featuring Niniane.

Some weeks Worcester Magazine makes such strides at transcending print that I don’t even italicize their name.

But this week, there was a lot of backsliding in regards to both paper and pixels.

Grabbing WoMag out of a newsrack on Main St, the first thing I noticed is how thin it’s getting. It’s about the size of the free weekly in Scranton.

The second thing I noticed: no Blog Log! To get the impact of this, you should know that WoMag’s website is totally 20th-century. No comments on articles, no permalinks to items in “Worcesteria.” Finding things in the archives is a chore. They could install WordPress and have an intern spend two hours each Wednesday cutting and pasting text, and they’d have a hipper website without spending a dime. So for WoMag, the Blog Log was their big connection to that Great Future Home of Journalism, the Internet. But this week, even the print-only InCity Times, with piles of URLs in the articles, was more net-friendly than WoMag.

Finally, they ran Zippy real small, in a box amidst the classifieds. If you’re willing to let the Pinhead spread out, he comes out so much better in print than on the screen.

Today I was telling NB about the newsblog h2otown, which seems to rule over the media landscape of little Watertown, Mass. She asked why Worcester Indymedia couldn’t accomplish something similar. I think it’s because the IMC site is run on sf-active, which makes contribution, adminstration, and navigation much harder than they need to be. I’m much happier blogging about the Golden Pizza fire on the obscure Pie and Coffee than on Worcester IMC, because it takes so damn long to post and moderate the article on IMC. IMC has many more readers, but for a minor post like this the effort is not worth it.

Weeks like this, I feel sure some entrepreneur will step in to rescue Worcester from the journalistic doldrums. It never happens. I guess I’m out of touch.