Author Archives: Ted

Thoughts on Newtown

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It’s been a little over a week since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary. I suspect for most people, the enormity of it is still sinking in. Last week I saw a clip of the opening Saturday Night Live used for their show–a children’s choir singing Silent Night, and nearly lost it.

Gun Control

It feels like there might actually be a consensus finally developing that there needs to be some sort of meaningful gun control. There is no reason for a civilian to be carrying around an automatic weapon. You don’t need an assault rifle for hunting. The best analogy I’ve seen is one by David Gergen – people have a right to drive, but the states get to regulate who can drive and can insist on certain minimum competencies. It should not be easy to get a gun without passing background checks.

Gun advocates are fond of saying that guns don’t kill people, people do— and that’s true to some extent. But we need to be keeping guns away from the type of person who would use a gun to kill people. If a madman can’t get access to a gun, yes, they may choose some other tool. But the results might not be as lethal. I noticed in Wikipedia that about the same time as the Sandy Hook shooting, there was also a mass stabbing in China. Those victims are still alive.

I think the proposal by the NRA that teachers and school personnel should be walking around armed is nuts on its face. You can’t go around putting guards everywhere, and I’d also be worried about the possibility of accidents, like the man who shot his son because he thought the son was an intruder, or by the possibility that one of the students could get their hands on the teacher’s gun and use it, either to intentionally hurt someone, or just as a result of play acting.

Mental Health

I saw the blog post by the mother of the child who was disturbed, “Thinking the Unthinkable“, about being the parent of a possibly dangerous child. She’s right of course; more needs to be done to identify and, if possible, treat people with mental illness before something happens. But, this is much easier said than done in both cases. Not all mentally ill people are dangerous—do we err on the side of protecting society, at the expense of possibly over treating, or worse, locking up, innocent, non-dangerous people, or do we err on the side of protecting the rights of people to be let alone if they wish to be, and possibly miss someone who will cause problems? I don’t know the answer to that. In addition, the author notes that her son has already received several forms of treatment—what if he turns out to be simply untreatable? Then what?

The Media

I think what the media has done to Newtown is unconscionable. The night it happened, we watched the news for a while, and then it started getting repetitive. It became obvious that there was nothing else to say and that they were simply milking things, and I had to turn it off. The media needs to shut the fuck up and let that town alone. There is no excuse to be pushing microphones in the face of some kid. There is no excuse for going up to an overwrought parent, and asking them, “How do you feel?” There is no excuse for every two-bit local station to send their own camera crew and reporter to the scene, flooding the town with tv trucks. It used to be that local stations covered their own local area, and left the other news to the network; I think they need to return to that practice. The people of Newtown need to be left in peace to grieve, and hopefully, to recover.

The People of Newtown

Finally, we come to the most important part, the people of Newtown. I don’t think anyone who hasn’t been in their shoes can imagine what they’re going through. I know I can’t, and I’m not going to try. Their lives will never be the same. People talk about healing, but I don’t think it’s the kind of wound that ever truly heals. It’s going to be part of their lives for the rest of their lives—and the survivors, siblings, classmates, friends, and even the parents are, for the most part, all young. They will be living with this for a long long  time. Hopefully, they will be able to support each other, and the rest of the town will support them, as they go through this process. What we can wish for them is that they are able to move past the pain, learn to live with their loss, and finally, be able to move on with the rest of their lives.

Season’s Greetings

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It’s hard to believe it’s that time of year again, especially with the warm weather we’ve had, but it’s Christmas time again, and in observance, I’ve tweaked the site’s colors.

Of course, hovering over all of this is the knowledge of what happened in Connecticut on Friday. I’m finding myself compartmentalizing things. Friday night, we were watching the news, and then it started to seem repetitive and exploitive, so I had to turn the TV off. This morning, I saw a clip of Saturday Night Live’s open with a children’s choir, and I just felt myself welling up. For my mother, there’s an additional resonance, since it brings back memories of the Christmas my cousin died. I can’t begin to imagine how the parents feel.

Unlike last year, I have not been running ahead of schedule this year. I did get the card out last week, but shopping has been a bear this year- I’ve been stumped for a couple of people on my list. I think I’m finally nearly there, though, and I’ve got a couple of packages arriving tomorrow.

Friday, we put up the tree, and yesterday, we went up to Rockport to do a little shopping, have lunch with my brother, and just generally bop around. The lights and the tree in the town center were pretty, but I wasn’t able to do much with just my Gorillapod. I’m actually thinking of going up there again later this week with tripod in hand (and no companions complaining that they’re cold/bored/hungry).

Season's Greetings

Season of Lights

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As we move into December, I’m beginning to see more and more Christmas lights. I’ve always loved them, while being thankful for the fact that we have no outside outlets and therefore can’t put up our own outside lights.

Driving around, there are several different kinds of lights to be seen. My favorites have always been the multicolored lights, with no white lights mixed in. Personally, at least for now, I prefer the old-fashioned incandescent types. They seem warmer, with a better distribution of color. The reds and oranges are brighter, the blues less prominent. The newer LED lights seem to be too heavy on the blues. Their blue lamps are quite bright, and  their oranges and reds less bright in comparison. I suspect that this is something that will get fixed in time–the manufacturers need to make light strings where the warmer colors are brighter.

My next favorite are the all white lights, which seem to be more fashionable right now. They tend to come both as shrub lighting and as a dangly effect on the house’s roofline. White lights are starting to come in both incandescent and LED varieties; for white lights I dislike the LEDs less than the multicolored LED lights. Old fashioned lights are warmer, and the LEDs are a cooler, whiter, white, but that somehow seems appropriate for a winter decoration. You sometimes see a mix of the two– one part of the lights are incandescent, and another part LED. I’m not sure this is always deliberate, and you can often tell the two apart, but sometimes it works well.

Another kind of lighting design, usually on trees, is lights all of one color– all green, all blue, all red. You usually see this on public displays, like in a park, though one of the houses in town is doing this too. I’m not so fond of single color displays, though they can work if different trees have different colors.

One thing that doesn’t work at all, in my opinion, is mixing colored lights with white lights. Do one or the other, please. Rather than appearing as another color, the white lights dilute the effect of the colored lights.

Finally, the last kind of lighting display, and probably the most old-fashioned, are the window lights. This is what we’ll be putting up in a few days. The lady who used to live across the street used to drape strings of the small multicolored lights in her front window; we have the candle lights. I’ve seen red, blue and green candle lights, but they always seem kind of cold and dark; I like the white or orange lights best.

Whatever the color or how they’re arranged, the lights are a welcome relief from the darkest nights of the year.

Last Paddle of the Season

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Today was my last kayaking trip of the season. I’ve had a season pass this year at Charles River Canoe and Kayak, and wanted to go one last time before they transfer over to the  Weston Ski Track for the winter. The weather was sunny, but seasonably chilly — a little over 50°, I’d guess. With water temperatures in the forties, though, wet suits were required,  so I wore my diving 7mm suit.

I wasn’t the only one on the river, either. As I was getting ready on the dock, a guy in a dry suit was returning on a stand up paddle board, and I saw a couple of other folks in kayaks over the course of the trip. It was fairly comfortable while I was in the sun; slightly chilly when I was in the shade. All the maples, and many of the other trees, had lost all their leaves, but the oaks still had their leaves, brown, but just beginning to drop. Continue reading →

Last Dive of the Season

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Hermit Crab

This gallery contains 9 photos.

I did my last dive of the season today. There were three of us, plus Dan Easa of East Coast Divers, and we ended up at Old Garden Beach in Rockport. Despite the impending storm two days away, the sea was flat, and the sun was relatively warm once the fog burned off. Once we were in the water, we snorkeled out to about get some depth under us, then descended. We swam over the sandy bottom, then moved further out into the rocks. There were lots of crabs, of several different sorts, plus we saw a sea robin and a school of fish. Continue reading →

Swans

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I was kayaking downstream on the Charles one Saturday evening this past July when I came upon a family of swans.

Swan Family

Swan Family

Papa Swan was not at all happy to see me; whenever I started to get close, he’d paddle rapidly toward me, and start hissing, while the mother stayed close to the younger ones.

Papa Swan to the defense

Papa Swan to the defense. Note the bow wave on him.

Continue reading →

Upstate New York

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Steps at the top of the gorge

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A couple of weekends ago, I went with my sister to visit my brother in upstate New York. He’s living in the Syracuse area, about an hour away from the Finger Lakes area, and he wanted to show us Watkins Glen Gorge and wine country. The gorge is awesome, and it’s beautiful country, with lots of wineries and farmlands. Continue reading →

In Praise of Paul

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Paul Adler, in the water

Paul Adler, in mid-water.

Paul Adler founded East Coast Divers back in the mid-seventies. This month marks the end of his tenure as owner; after over three decades in business, he is selling the store to his employees, Nick Fazah and Alex Dulavitz as of the end of the month.

Paul was the person who first enabled me to scuba dive, in a quickie “Discover Scuba” program over at Dedham Racquettime.
A year or so earlier, I’d followed Route 128 on the motorcycle to the end in Gloucester, and then followed Route 127 around Cape Ann. In every little inlet and cove, it seemed like there were a group of divers. “God, I’d like to try that,” I thought. So I’d taken a set of swimming lessons at the Y–I couldn’t swim– and now, here I was, in the pool at Dedham, just paddling around in the shallows, to see if I would really like it. I loved it, and signed up for the certification course. Continue reading →

Night Dive

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Squid

This gallery contains 10 photos.

Thursday night, I did a night dive off Back Beach with a group from East Coast Divers. It was an awesome dive; the water was relatively warm, the dive was easy and we saw a lot of stuff.

The main point of a night dive is that things come out in the night that you can’t see during the day. And the highlight, for me, were the squids. I’d never seen them here in New England before, but I saw a bunch of them on this dive. We also saw a bunch of very small lobsters, a flounder, a small skate, and a shorthorn sculpin. Continue reading →