This New England

All hail the creators of "slydial,'' yet another service that makes it easier to avoid having to talk to an angry or at least loquacious person.

Caller ID and voice mail have already made it possible to at least delay an unpleasant or wasteful phone conversation. The trouble with voice mail, however, is that you can hear the message if you're in the vicinity of the phone. And the other end can hear your insincere babblings. Jarring!

But now you can further lower your anxiety by getting "slydial,'' by which you leave voice mail messages without the problematic people you're calling even knowing it until later. You can always say you tried to talk to them.

As there are more and more ways of communicating with people, there must be more and more ways to stop communicating with them lest we lose what's left of our minds. Is all this dehumanizing? Well, yes, and that's why it's such a good business model!

Back to Ma Bell?

With the energy crisis, the recession and what have you, will we see a return to the fully regulated public utility in places where's "reregulation'' and "restructuring'' have been the vogue?

Consider that Connecticut regulators plan to order Southern Connecticut Gas Corp. to issue credits to customers as offsets for collecting $15.1 million in what the state calls excessive profit of 13.66 percent. (Not bad!) The state said the Orange-based utility exceeded its 10 percent maximum allowable profit level, just as its sister company, Connecticut Natural Gas, did earlier this year.

But really cracking down on these profits might scare away investors, and so reduce the capital available for repairs and improvements. So maybe a few states will end up taking over these utilities and running them like agencies.

Death-penalty test

It will be interesting to see if an unfortunate book called Murder in Connecticut, about a nationally infamous home invasion in Cheshire in which a mother and two daughters were murdered and the father badly beaten, will lead to many calls to execute the two men charged. The trial could be a pivotal moment in the death-penalty debate in New England, although the volume is really more about the community's reaction to the murders than to the awful acts themselves.

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Disconnected train stations

Word that Grand Central Station, not the usual Penn Station, will be the New York City stop for Amtrak trains from Albany for a couple of weekends while railroad switches are upgraded reminded me of how crazy and inconvenient it is that New York and Boston each have two badly linked major train stations

Think of how much better it would be if you didn't have to schlep from the Metro North line (which ends in Grand Central) to get to Penn Station, the main Amtrak center in New York. Likewise how ridiculous it is that you have to go across town between South and North Station in Boston if you want to take the train to Maine from, say, Providence. A direct Amtrak link between those two stations would have been worth a lot of the Big Dig.

 Tags  Amtrak caller ID Cheshire Grand Central Murder in Connecticut slydial voice mail

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