This New England

Good news for government, business and other crooks in Massachusetts. The New York Times is threatening to shut down the Boston Globe. See The Globe's page one story today.

Ah, the joys of being part of a publicly traded company in the age of impatient (and sometimes paid-off) stock analysts, desperate creditors and copyright infringement!

My guess is that The Times may have a possible buyer for The Globe but that as a condition for buying the paper The Times must strip down the cost structure first.

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Boy, was I wrong in my prediction about this! Vermont legislators overrode Governor Jim Douglas's veto of a bill to authorize gay marriage. I said they wouldn't be able to get enough votes.

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-- Johann Georg Bergmueller (1688-1762)

King Midas listens attentively to Pan.

Harvard can be a tough place. The Boston Globe reports that Iris Mack, an investment manager for the World's Richest University, complained in 2002 to then-President Lawrence Summers that the university's investment company was taking undue risks in managing the money.

She was fired later that year for making such impolitic complaints.

Mr. Summers was one of the leaders who in the second Clinton administration pushed against regulating the assorted derivatives that have helped get us into the financial crisis, which has lost Harvard billions in endowment money.

So much for the spirit of free inquiry and speech. And you're a genius until you're not.

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With all the cutbacks in local news, it's interesting to hear of WHDH-TV in Boston deciding to drop NBC's Jay Leno show and run an hour of local news at 10 p.m. instead -- because it thinks it can make more money that way! The experiment starts next fall. An insult to Massachusetts native Leno?

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Forbes.com has named Portland America's most livable city. Weather isn't everything!

The magazine cited the city's income growth and culture, low crime and low unemployment. The Forbes Magazine-connected Web seems to like Portland's cobblestoned Old Port area the most. Washington, D.C., suburb Bethesda, Md., came in second, by the way. Parts of Bethesda looks a little like a New England town -- Custer Road neighborhood, for instance.

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The Interior Department says coastal wind farms could produce enough electricity to meet 25 percent of America's electrical needs -- and notes that East Coast areas, because of shallow water, are the easiest places to put them.

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h, the inventiveness of New Englanders: The colorful floating rope once used to connect lobster traps will be repackaged as door mats.

A new regulation, designed to protect endangered right whales, prohibits lobstermen from using the rope to link traps because the whales can get tangled up in the rope and drown.

So lobstermen are selling the rope to a nonprofit foundation, the Maine Float-Rope Co., which will make multicolored hand-woven doormats the money from whose sale will be used for environmental projects.

That is, until they run out.

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Notable news coming?

SUBJECT: "Fall River Energy Enterprise"

WHEN: Tuesday, April 7, 2009

1:30 p.m. presentation and press conference

WHERE: Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Center, 151 Martine Street, Fall River, MA 02723

Mayor Robert Correia and the Fall River Office of Economic Development have invited city, state and federal elected leaders and officials, members of the education and business community, local activists and other interested parties to attend this presentation by Newport Collaborative Architects, Inc. about a vision plan on Fall River's ability to be a regional leader in renewable energy. The plan has initiatives for the economy and the environment.

 Tags  America's Most Liveable Boston Globe floating rope Gov. Jim Douglas Iris Mack Jay Leno Maine Portland River Energy Enterprise

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