This New England

Just what do the very well compensated members of corporate boards such as Goldman Sachs's do when the company they're supposed to be monitoring runs wild with greed? See this Brown Daily Herald piece about Brown President Ruth Simmons.

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Massachusetts is talking with Nissan North America to find ways to expand electric-car use in the state.

With all the windpower potential, think of how much gasoline could be replaced by electricity for our transportation.

And, for that matter, how much clean, electric heat could replace dirty oil and gas.

In the '50s, electric heat was seen as the future. Maybe with alternative energy that future is finally here.

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College applicants are going for the big names. Brown University, for instance, has received a staggering 30,000 applicants for admission to its undergraduate program this season.

It's a fine place, but above all, it has developed a glamorous name, including among foreign students.

Such is their prestige, and the belief among applicants and their parents that admission will write them a ticket for life, that the fancy schools -- the Ivy League, Duke, Stanford and a few others -- can jack up their prices to $50,000 and the applicants keep flooding in.
Will they come to think the price was too high in 20 years or so? I suppose it depends to no small degree on how they value earning potential.

In any event, it's good economic news for New England.

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Photo and commentary by WILLIAM MORGAN

If you think that President Obama was a little hectoring in his State of the Union Speech -- a bit too reminiscent of the dour Presbyterian Woodrow Wilson lecturing Congress, how about these rules for construction workers that Building Brown posted publicly on the Brown campus, on the East Side of Providence?

It is difficult to know which admonition is more off base.

"Think like a Parent.'' An indulgent prepster parent? Or a tough Archie Bunker back-of-the-hand dad?

"Consider the Students.'' Innocents who know nothing of four-letter words, booze, controlled substances or tobacco use? Or scholars who pay so much tuition that they shouldn't be upset by compressors or jack-hammers?

One is reminded of the 19th-Century critic John Ruskin, who declared that a a bad man cannot build a good building.

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"Ancestors in the Land of Frederick Church,'' acrylic by Nancy Whitcomb.

The title of New Hampshireman J.D. Salinger's most famous work, "The Catcher in the Rye,'' is from a misreading of the title of Robert Burns's poem "Comin' Through the Rye.'' The novel's protagonist, Holden Caulfield, sees himself as a "catcher in the rye'' who must keep the world's children from falling off "some crazy cliff.'' Salinger's mother was Scotch-Irish, by the way.

And here is my friend Philip Terzian's obituary of Holden Caulfield, posted on his Facebook page (which is often hilarious):

Holden Caulfield, Attorney, Dies at 75

By Carl Luce

NEW YORK--Holden Caulfield, a founding partner of the Manhattan real-estate law firm of Ackley, Caulfield and Marsella PPC, died Monday in North Conway, New Hampshire. He was 75.Mr. Caulfield, who had a vacation residence in New Hampshire, suffered massive internal injuries after slipping and falling over a cliff in the White Mountains on Saturday while trying to save a young girl, and died at a nearby hospital, according to his son, Allie Caulfield II. He lived at the Edmont Hotel in midtown Manhattan.

An attorney and litigator in New York since the mid-1960s, Mr. Caulfield joined two onetime classmates to form Ackley, Caulfield and Marsella in 1971, specializing in real-estate litigation and property management in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. "Holden was a great lawyer and a great friend," said partner Maurice Ackley in a statement released by the firm. "He loved the majesty of the law, and he hated phonies." The other partner, Edgar Marsella, died of colon cancer in 2002.

Mr. Caulfield, a native of Manhattan, was born in 1935 and attended a series of preparatory schools before entering Brown University, from which he graduated in 1957. After a brief period of military service he obtained his law degree at New York University and began practicing in 1962. A period as counsel to the Antolini Group, property developers on Long Island, led to Mr. Caulfield's interest in real estate litigation and property management. In 1996 his firm won a record judgment of $118.5 million in a landmark case involving development rights, Spencer vs. Stradlater.

Mr. Caulfield was a longtime board member of the Central Park Conservancy and a trustee of Pencey Preparatory School in Agerstown, Pa.

Mr. Caulfield's marriage to Sally Hayes ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife of 39 years, Jane Gallagher Caulfield, of Manhattan; their son Allie II, of Brooklyn; and three grandchildren. He is also survived by a brother, the writer D.B. Caulfield of Pacific Palisades, Calif., and a sister, Phoebe Caulfield-Madoff, of West Hartford, Conn.

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Allegations that the Somali Bantu Community Association, in Manchester, N.H., is teaching from the Quran has led to a federally government funded program for Somali refugee children being suspended, reports the Manchester Union Leader. The association is run out of the city's Multicultural Center.

Of course, the Feds aren't supposed to fund the teachng of religion in any event, but the real fear here probably is that this organization will somehow be a kitchen for terrorism in snowy New Hampshire.

Probably not, but stranger things have happened among anxious immigrants with Muslim backgrounds.
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For a few chuckles about the deliciously ridiculous (but cynical!) claim of some Wampanoags that, in effect, they own Nantucket Sound because somebody might have lived in it when it was dry ground during the last Ice Age, read Walter Brook's piece (with picture!) in Cape Cod Today.

I suggest that as many people as possible join Interior Secretary Ken Salazar at his prayer session Tuesday -- especially people who just got their electric bills.

The stuff below is from Cape Cod Today

Secretary of the Interior to visit Mashpee's South Beach at 6am
Aquinnah visit to follow. Cape Wind officials not invited to attend

By Walter Brooks

There is seldom if ever a clear view of the horizon from any beach in Mashpee which does not have an obstruction.

The obstructions start with Monomoy Island to the east, Nantucket to the southeast including the proposed Tuckernuck site for a wind farm, and Martha's Vineyard to the south.

The view is also continuously cluttered with ferries, sailboats and fishing vessels as the rising sun moves across these areas from solstice to solstice.

As we reported on Tuesday, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has scheduled a trip to Boston for this coming Tuesday "to resolve a dispute over the country's first offshore wind project."

Mr. Salazar added that the Cape Wind project was "important for this country", but won't determine the direction of offshore wind development in total.

Although the secretary's office has not finalized his schedule, informed sources in Mashpee tell us that Mr. Salazar will be there as early as 6 am.

That's the hour of sunrise at this time of year.

That's allegedly the time when our local tribe gathers on a beach to have their "Sunrise Greeting Ceremony."

When asked, Cape Wind sources said they had not been invited to attend the meeting here, and a second Indian-Salazar meeting is also scheduled in Aquinnah on Martha's Vineyard.

Tug of warriors?

It has also been reported that there is dissension among Mashpee tribal leaders about who should be the master of ceremony for the Interior Secretary's visit.

Tribal Chairman Cedric Cromwell feels it is his right and responsibility, while the Tribal Historic Preservation Authority and Medicine Man in training George "Chucky" Green believes it to be his show because he initiated the letter to the Massachusetts Historical Commission which started the whole sideshow rolling several months ago.

Behind all this looms the heavy and well-endowed hand of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound on whose stationery Mr. Green's letter was written.

The Alliance is reputed to have spent over $20 million to date to stop the wind farm. The group's top financial supporter is Osterville billionaire Bill Koch.

The group's co-chairman is Yarmouth's Christy Mihos, who is a candidate for the Republican nomination for Governor this election.

Praying to what?

The two separate studies for the Cape Wind project, first by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and later by the Interior Department, of the area for the proposed wind farm, Horseshoe Shoal, included studies for Indian artifacts.

The Massachusetts Underwater Archeological Board reported that none were found there.

The Mashpee tribe are what were called "Praying Indians" because they converted from their native beliefs to Christianity for which they were given the area known as Mashpee by the early Cape Cod colonists.

The tribe also served with the colonists against the Wampanoags and other Indian tribes during the infamous King Philip's War.

U.S. considers Georges Bank seismic testing

The U.S. government is opening the door to seismic testing on the continental shelf off the Atlantic Coast, a step that could lead to offshore drilling on the U.S. side of Georges Bank for the first time in 30 years... Nova Scotia is watching the developments in Washington closely.

A moratorium on testing and drilling on the Canadian side of Georges Bank -- a rich fishing ground southwest of the province - expires on Dec. 31, 2012.

Several scientific studies are underway to help federal and provincial politicians decide whether to lift the ban... CBC.

Oil rigs and 2 islands block the view too

Salazar said in our earlier story that the Interior Department would on today initiate a 45-day public comment period on the environmental impacts of allowing seismic operations in the Atlantic.

Six companies have applied to conduct seismic operations in the coastal waters and another three have indicated interest in doing so.

"We do not know a lot about the Atlantic," Salazar told the Platts Energy Podium.

"That's because for 30 years there has been no geophysical information that's been developed in connection with the resources out in the Atlantic."

As an interesting sidebar, Governor Deval Patrick spoke at the Cape Wind Contractors Meeting today in Boston on the importance of the jobs that will be created by Cape Wind and in making Massachusetts a global leader in offshore clean energy.

The meeting was held in the Arlington/Berkley Room at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston.

http://www.capecodtoday.com/

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The many millions in new federal money for New England rail-passenger improvements announced yesterday were very good news for a region whose settlement patterns and compactness, and even winter, make it close to ideal for passenger trains.

The irony is that a lot of these improvements involve restoring service that was killed off in the 1950s and 1960s by the Interstate Highway System, cheap gasoline and short-sighted public policy.

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And so the Greta Garbo of 20th Century American literature, J.D. Salinger, has died at 91.

To me, he was long a ghost from New York in its imperial glory of the '40s and '50s. I keep thinking of the movie "The World of Henry Orient,'' though that came a little later; it evoked the tone of Salinger's Manhattan world.

Back when I was in a Dartmouth College Chinese history class in the late '60s with the beautiful Claire Douglas, from whom Salinger had been divorced a year before, we hardly ever thought of him except as an eccentric recluse living in Cornish, N.H., down the Connecticut Valley a few miles. (The Cornish area had long collected writers, painters and sculptors.)

Every once in a while someone would claim to have seen him in an old raincoat wandering the college's stately Baker Library.

A few later it would be the reclusive Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who also lived close by, doing the same thing.

Our teacher, Leo Lee, seemed smitten with the unreclusive and then rather jolly Claire.

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Untitled watercolor by Hilda Gorenstein

There's some terrific science being done in New England on Alzheimer's disease.

Consider MIT's Li-Huei Tsai's work on using the HDAC inhibitor drug to bring back memory. Her research is now being done on mice, but there seems a lot of hope here for humans.

Also what can bring back parts of memory is art.

The Hilgos Foundation is promoting that idea through a movie called "I Remember Better When I Paint,'' whose instigation was how distinguished Chicago artist Hilda Gorenstein's spirits and mind were re-energized when she returned to painting after suffering from Alzheimer's for a while.

One of the works she did when when she had advanced Alzheimer's is above.

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Some officials in Vermont want to ban opening public schools until after Labor Day, with the aim of easing the way for people to keep summer jobs, enjoy summer vacations and so on. And indeed, it does seem to me almost an unnatural act to be in school before Labor Day weekend (or, as I thought in my boyhood, ever).

But with Vermont's snow days would this be possible without extending the school year to July 4th some years?

It's up to the districts in the end -- as long as the districts hew to the state-mandated 175 days a year of school or more.

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Fishing regulators are easing limits on scallop catches off New England, which seems fair enough considering the latest data on stocks.

A nice boost for one of the region's comparatively few industries based on a natural resource.

Good news for New Bedford!

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New England Board of Higher Education event: "Higher Education Sustainability Summit 2010: A Climate Change on Campus"

NEBHE will present "Higher Education Sustainability Summit 2010: A Climate Change on Campus" on Friday, April 23, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Worcester.

It's a follow-up to NEBHE's May 2009 conference, "Greening Higher Education: Saving the Planet and Saving Money." The event this year will gather leaders in higher education, government and business to explore renewable energy, green architecture and other issues in sustainability across the campus.

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