Going by the pen name of Jay Slay, a man was putting the finishing touches on one of two sand drawings. One, a mandala like creation; the other an homage to the new year, 2012. He thought the alignment of planets in 2012 would have a profound effect on our DNA; hence, the DNA strands in the drawing.

As people thanked him, he insisted that they, too, could draw in the sand.

Spinach seedling on the left; chard seedlings on the right in a grow box

I know this is late, but I’d like to take this time to thank the Food Project for the free seeds they gave out at the first CultureFest in downtown Lynn 2 years ago. I selected chard, spinach, shell bean and snap pea. I finally got around to planting them in my community garden this past spring, and these little seeds have given my family more than enough delicious, healthy meals. Seeds are a miracle, small condensed packages containing the instructions grow into a variety of leafy green, woody and flowering plants that then produce the very same packages of instruction to live again.

Ultimately though, my thanks goes to the vegetables themselves or to who or what, if anything, created them.

Chard (scientific name Beta Vulgaris) gave me a gift that just kept on giving. For as long as I harvested it, it kept coming back, growing new leaves to be used in salads, substituted for lettuce in sandwiches and sautéed as a side. My experience with chard prompted me to look up some facts about it.

Beta Vulgaris is a close relative to the beet. Where beets were bred for larger roots, chard was bred to increase its leaves. It is Mediterranean in origin and a biennial, meaning that it flowers in its second year. The flowers are inconspicuously small and grow on dense spikes. Maybe I’ll get to see them next year.

The spinach was good too, but it is an annual, flowering in the same year it’s planted. Spinach loves colder weather. As it gets hotter, spinach does what is called bolting. Something about the longer days and increased heat causes it to stop producing its wide leaves and send up a single stalk with narrower leaves. On this stalk, you’ll see dense arrays of inconspicuous flowers, very small with no petals, and containing an abundance of pollen, which clouds the air if you disturb them.

Snap peas also like to start early, in the colder weather. I planted them too late perhaps, in full sun, so the yield was low. Fresh snap peas off the vine, as well as cherry and grape tomatoes, are nature’s candy.

When the shell bean pods turned yellow with purple highlights, it was time to pick and break them open. Again, not a large yield there, but enjoyable nonetheless. Next year, string beans.

Side with the Seeds
Lyrics by Wilco

Tires type black
Where the blacktop cracks
Weeds spark through
Dark green enough to be blue
When the mysteries we believe in
Aren’t dreamed enough to be true
Some side with the leaves
Some side with the seeds

The treetops nod
the rain applauds
The park grows dark
And the swings all slowly die
But you and I will be undefeated
by agreeing to disagree
No one wins but the thieves
so why side with anything

The streetlights glow
Comes and goes
When the sun comes back
As we all can plainly see
Embracing the situation
Is our only chance to be free
I’ll side with you
If you side with me

Beans, Snap Peas and Tomatoes

The 17 foot, 3 story mural is a project of LynnArts. The bottom third will feature mosaic panels created by Lynn students. The mosaics of the two schools that have completed theirs are featured in the LynnArts front window where you can also see offerings from the LynnArts Holiday Show and Sale open until December 30.

The LynnArts website has a page devoted to the mural project where you can see a sketch of the whole design, developed with input from the Lynn community. The bottom third is projected to be finished by this Spring.

The city’s graffiti hotline is (781) 477-7099. Be sure to press 2 a the first prompt, then 8 at the second. (The city website says go straight to 8.) See my previous posts, Experiments in Civics and Cognitive Therapy and Counting the Days, for the back story.

Other good things are in store for Williams Avenue Park. East Lynn Community Association board member Eliana Runyon said her group plans to petition the Lynn Parks and Recreation Department to adopt it. Eliana is also working to bring a new play structure in with the help of Lynn Community Facilities Manager John Moberger, organize regular cleanups and plant some greenery.

Now, if only the Mayo Group would do something about the tags that adorn its properties. If memory serves, outgoing Councillor at-Large Paul Crowley worked on a solution by which the city would arrange for graffiti removal on private property owner signed a waiver.

On a positive note, street art is making the downtown area come alive with painted utility boxes by Raw Arts and a mural taking shape next to the Lynn Museum. Hey, we need art up here too!

The Daily Item: Paving fix vexes Lynn resident.

Don’t settle for less.

Join the organizers of Lynn’s 3rd Annual World Folk Festival on Thursday night, November 17, at the Tides Restaurant in Nahant for dinner. The restaurant is donating 10% of all bar and food purchases from 6 to 9 p.m. to next year’s festival on June 30, 2012, at Lynn Heritage State Park.

Julio Bare will entertain you with his music and the organizers will screen a video of this year’s event.

Not only can you financially support the festival, this is your chance to get involved. What kind of music would you like to hear – from India, Japan, Mali, Iraq, Peru, Appalachia, Barbados, Cuba, Haiti? Should they focus on dance: Irish, Latino, Israeli, Greek?

A family of four enjoys the ice cream social at last year's fair. For more photos of last year's event, including a police officer getting his flu vaccine, click anywhere on the photo to surf to ELCA's Facebook photo page.

The East Lynn Community Association will co-host its 3rd Annual Resource Fair with the PTO of Ingalls Elementary School on Tuesday November 15th from 6:30-8:00 p.m. at Ingalls Elementary School, One Collins Street Terrace, in Lynn.

There is no admission charge and everyone–of any age or area of Lynn–is welcome.

Organizations’ tables for displays will be on the ground floor in the gymnasium. ELCA will be offering voter registration, association information, and a raffle. The Ingalls PTO is having a bake sale with yummy home-made goods. Once again, there will be an ice cream social with Super Sundaes put on by Treadwell’s. Free parking is available in the Ingalls lot behind the school.

The Lynn Health Department will be on hand to offer free flu vaccinations and blood pressure checks for anyone seeking these services. Many other vital organizations have signed on to participate as well, and we anticipate that this will be our most exciting fair to date.

You can also save a stamp and a trip to the post office: Item Santa donation canisters will be available so you can just drop your donation in, helping to make the holidays brighter for our children who otherwise would not have an exciting holiday. The need is especially great this year!

The mission of the East Lynn Community Association is to promote pride and ownership in the Lynn community through beautification, education, recreation, and neighborly relationships. You can keep up with ELCA activities at www.eastlynncommunity.org and our Facebook page. For more information, contact ELCA at east.lynn.assn@comcast.net or 781-346-9060.

Image via Wikipedia

Are you going to vote on Nov. 8th? In the best of all possible worlds, you want your vote to count, right? Maybe if you bullet vote, your vote will count more. Then again, maybe not.

In the upcoming election, you can vote for up to 4 of 8 at-Large Councillor candidates and up to 6 of 8 School Committee candidates. If you only vote for one or two of your favorite candidates and no one else, you’re bullet voting. I’ve always been skeptical of this tactic.

It sounds sensible and feels like you can swing the election, game the system to help your candidate win. Besides, it couldn’t hurt, could it? Then again, you’re not using all of your votes, potentially letting someone you don’t like squeak through because you didn’t exercise your full privileges. Surely there are four candidates out of 8 that you would rather see win.

Consider the following scenario, quoted in full from Larry Davidson’s blog, Learning Strategies. Larry speculated about the effectiveness of bullet voting in the 2005 election for Boston City Council when Sam Yoon was one of the candidates.

Suppose you and 20 others agree that your first choice is Sam Yoon and your second choice is Matt O’Malley. And suppose, before your 21 ballots are counted, Yoon is in a tight race for fourth place, just 13 votes behind O’Malley. If the 21 of you bullet-vote for Yoon, your votes put him 8 votes ahead of O’Malley for fourth place, letting Yoon squeak in. But if the 21 of you dilute your support by voting for both of these fine candidates, Yoon remains 13 votes behind O’Malley, who then pushes Yoon out of fourth place. Net result: your second choice would be elected and your first choice defeated. Bullet voting is clearly the correct strategy.

On the other hand, there is also an argument against bullet voting. To understand this argument we have to consider a candidate of medium popularity whom you definitely do not want elected. Let’s call him Steve Murphy, to pick a name at random. Now suppose Murphy is 13 votes ahead of O’Malley for fourth place before the 21 ballots from you and your friends are counted. And suppose that Yoon is way ahead (or way behind, it doesn’t matter which), so your 21 votes for Yoon won’t make any difference in his election. If you bullet-vote for Yoon, what happens? Murphy gets elected by finishing in fourth place! But if you each cast two votes — one for Yoon and one for O’Malley — then O’Malley finishes 8 votes ahead of Murphy and squeaks in for a fourth-place victory! Net result of refusing to bullet-vote: your second choice would be elected and your last choice would be defeated. Bullet voting is clearly not the correct strategy!

You’ve got to admit, the success of your bullet vote depends a lot on the assumptions you make about each candidate’s chances for winning. The house of cards you build can very easily fall. There are just too many variables and permutations of voting behavior to consider. So, will bullet voting work in the upcoming election? I think it’s impossible to know. The scenarios cited above are just two of an infinite number of possible eventualities.

Even so, take a look at the results of the September 20th primary election for Lynn City Council and School Committee, taken directly from the city of Lynn website.

When I first thought about writing this post, I thought that there were too many variables to justify bullet voting. Now, I’m not so sure. I also wrestled with the wisdom of substituting our Lynn candidate’s names for Davidson’s Boston candidates in the selection I quoted from his blog. I know how I feel about each candidate, but would rather allow you, the reader, to draw your own conclusions.

Some questions to consider:

How effectively is each candidate working to get his base out to vote?

How much money does each candidate have left to spend?

Both of these questions may impact how close the races are. If a contender has a deep war chest and uses it wisely, he’s likely to do better than expected.

If corporations were people, you’d be on my list of favorites. Congratulations on 10 years of strengthening communities by connecting diverse individuals and organizations through civic engagement initiatives in ten Massachusetts locations, one of which is Lynn.

When I’d bring you up in conversation, people would hear the word capital and ask what kind of company you were. In fact, you are an incorporated nonprofit organization encouraging individuals to take a more active role in their community and connect with their neighbors.

Maybe it was the word “capital” in your title. If capital is broadly defined as an asset used to make a profit, social capital is the intangible asset one accumulates by making connections and networking with others. Social capital is used to create communities that are safer, healthier and more vital.

This blog started at SCI Lynn. Here is my first post.

What encouraged me to blog was a contest. The details are vague to me now, but the goal was to earn as many social capital points as possible by starting and posting to a blog. In those days, SCI Lynn represented the accumulation of points by placing a small yellow house symbol next to your name each time you wrote a post. Since I haven’t posted there in a while, my current total remains at 117.

Tran Le ran the Lynn office in 2004. Through SCI Lynn, she promoted neighborhood cleanups, discount barrels from Lynn Lumber with covers to deter the rats and Lynn restaurants. Eating together, after all, is a great way to strengthen social bonds. I’m not sure if Tran was a volunteer, but since her departure, her role has been filled by a succession of eager AmeriCorps volunteers, the first of which was David Hankerson from Atlanta.

I’ve never thought of technology as an end unto itself but as a means of expression. Executive Director and founder David Crowley has taken Web 2.0 technology and run with it to create internet portals like SCI Lynn for ten communities in ten years. But SCI has an offline component as well, sponsoring and showing up at community events and public meetings, encouraging people to volunteer. David envisions a Civic Communications Corp tasked with ensuring equal access to the digital technology that is not only crucial to our economy now, but an effective means of civic engagement.

So Happy Anniversary, SCI. And here’s to another 10 years and beyond.

Fence protection

Yet here I am, mixing by the seat of my pants.

At the Home Depot, there are so many brands that my indecision feels like I’m stuck wearing cement boots. To make matters worse, I must make a decision between concrete and cement. I didn’t know there was a difference. Evidently concrete is cement mixed with gravel. A line drawing on the red 50 lb. bag of Quickcrete shows a man fixing a fence post in the ground with the product. This must be the stuff. I stand up from lifting the bag and feel my spinal cord slowly compress.

I am plainly out of my element, making it up as I go along. But I will not be deterred.

DIY Home Improvement is dangerous territory. But I’m just so stubborn and cheap that I’ll do whatever it takes to keep the rats out, my dogs in and prevent the glacier of debris next door from creeping into my yard while simultaneously attempting to cut costs. I am a charter member of the cheap bastards club.

The commercial lot next door presents a decent enough brick facade out front, featuring Pizza Lovers, Bibi’s Hair Salon and a small grocery. But a wasteland exists in the back where 2 little boys play amongst the junk and weeds sometimes, several inbred perpetually frustrated pit bulls served time in a fenced-in concrete-surfaced pen all day and layer upon layer of refuse dating back from the industrial revolution to the present has built up such that a cross-section would make a perfect illustration in an archeological text-book of the clearly defined layers of junk left from civilizations past.

When it rains or when the rats dig under, pieces of junk from the other side of the fence creep under it in a sort of glacial unravelling of past decades. Shards of blue glass, colored plastic, chunks of concrete, a rodent skull, assorted bones and plastic bag shreds appear and make their home in my backyard for a spell.

To make matters worse, one of my pugs is extremely interested in what lurks on the other side. Furthermore, he would eat rocks if he could, and the result would be death from bursting. The never-ending smorgasbord of potentially tasty tidbits is too tempting, his food detector switches into overdrive and there’s the danger he could ingest something we’d regret.

So I placed pressure-treated boards along the bottom of the fence in effort to staunch the flow, but I’d reached an impasse: How to keep the boards up against the uneven surface of the fence with practically no solid anchor to drive in a nail. Hence my bright idea to stick a 2 x 4 in the ground to act as a post. Hence my need for concrete to fix the post in the ground.

Mind you, I don’t know where this idea came from, it just came, inspired by Divine Providence perhaps. So while I have occasional misgivings that I am going down the wrong road and can’t believe the lengths to which I’m going, something keeps prodding me on, saying “just do it. If you build it they will come,” or in my case, they will stop coming.

OK, I’ll do it. It may not look pretty when it’s done, but I’ll do it.

I’ll become a handyman, a do-it-yourselfer in true cheap bastard fashion.

Home improvement, here I come.

The Lynn Item’s account of last night’s debate at the Porthole Pub prompted a strong response from Seth over at Living in Lynn. It’s a good analysis. I agree with him that City Hall employees should not be required to live in Lynn. It’s time to start hiring the best, period. The old ways have not achieved the breakthroughs we need to bring more business to the city.

Finally, can someone tell me why Buzzy Barton seems to be so popular? He has raised more than any other candidate for councilor-at-large and his signs are all over the place. Yet he is by far the most inarticulate of all the candidates, seeming to agree on all the easy answers the other councilors give to questions at the debates. A “life-long Lynner” serving on the city pension board, he has worked as a Lynn fireman and basketball coach for the public schools and sued the city several times.

To see who’s supporting whom head on over to the City Clerk and Elections Chief’s page on the city website and look for 2010 Campaign Finance.

By the way it’s been 29 days since I called the city’s graffiti hotline on the Williams Avenue Park tagging.

What makes a good read? Besides that sense of caring for the subject and the desire to voraciously consume the contents of said piece, an good story is paramount. A follows B follows C in what seems like inevitable progression. Rearranging the elements in any other way just doesn’t make sense. It’s not so much that there’s a beginning, a middle and an end, but a whole stream of events or ideas that cannot be told in any other order.

Why not great reads? I don’t know. Perhaps these pieces don’t need any hype. They stand on their own. No need to build them up. Besides, it’s only my opinion. My good reads might be boringly dull to others though I don’t know how that could be possible.

So not quite knowing what this blog is becoming, I offer the first in a series of good reads. In this week’s Phoenix, writer S. I. Rosenbaum serves up Voices Carry. “Marty hears things that aren’t there. Doctors say she’s schizophrenic. A new movement says she’s just human.”

I read this and thought that we really don’t know what someone else’s circumstances are at the first superficial glance. It’s so easy to see a heroin addict or an unemployed person on the street and declare that they’re just sponging off the rest of society when we don’t know the whole story.

The candidates are Patricia Capano, Maria Carrasco, Donna Coppola, Delores DiPhillipo, John Ford, Jr., Charlie Gallo, Vincent Spirito and Rick Starbard. DiPhillipo and Gallo are running for the first time; the rest are incumbents.

The election is November 8. If you have a child in the Lynn public school system, you owe to yourself and your child to be informed. Even if you don’t have a child, you can still vote for 6 out of the 8. Nothing less than the future of our children is at stake. Do you like the way the school system is being run now or do you want to see changes?

Hold your elected representatives’ feet to the fire. At the East Lynn debate last month, I heard candidates take pride in keeping classroom sizes down to around 30 pupils. I heard these same candidates state that overcrowding is a problem. Both statement may be true, but is one more misleading than the other? What is the best way to handle the incoming flood of new students whose first language may not be English? What would you do?

Here are some resources to get you thinking:

City of Lynn and School Department Budgets, Lynn Public Schools, Downtown Lynn’s School Committee Series, The Lynn School Watch and the above mentioned An Education.

Vest-a-Dog President Katy HInds at today's tag sale benefit

[Ed. note: This is another in a series of guest posts by the author's greyhound, Sheena.]

I was out walking Tom this wonderfully smell-filled morning (the wind carrying scents from Dog knows where) when my eyes spied a sign on a distant corner. Tag sale to raise money for Vest-a-Dog at 410 Eastern Ave.

We walked down to 410, which is the Bethany Congregational Church. Down the stairs and into the basement we descended. Kathy Hinds, President of Massachusetts Vest-a-Dog greeted us. Since I understood very little of what was said other than that Vest-a-Dog provides bullet proof vests for police dogs, I’ll let Tom do some writing:

Thanks, Sheena. I’ll do my best. Massachusetts Vest-a-Dog started in 2000 when Kathy Hinds’ daughter read the story of an eleven year-old girl in San Diego inspired to raise money to buy bullet-proof vests for police dogs upon reading about the death of Solo, a police dog shot and killed in the line of duty. Since then, Vest-a-Dog has helped provide more than 300 K9 protective vests to Massachusetts law enforcement agencies.

“Vest-a-Dog helps provide vests, essential equipment, training and dogs,” says Hinds. Vests are quite expensive, she says, ranging in price from $1000 for standard bullet-proof vests to $2400 for special SWAT team vests.

Just what do these dogs do for us? Areas of K9 certification include evidence recovery, tracking, criminal apprehension, narcotics, explosive and arson detection.

Hinds says that “during our fundraising efforts, handlers have often noted the fragility of their K9 budgets and lack of funding for other equipment  such as hot & pop units, bite sleeves and suits, kennels, specialized training and the ultimate big ticket item: the purchase of a dog.”

Back to you, Sheena.

Thanks Tom. And thanks for buying those delicious peanut butter dog cookies. I bet even you would enjoy one. And many other people, dogs, people-dogs and dog-people would enjoy these upcoming events.

Williams Avenue Park, June 2009

Don’t the people who live closer to it care? (There I go again, jumping to conclusions.)

1. Forming a hypothesis–a possible explanation of observed phenomena.
2. Testing the hypothesis through recorded observations of controlled experiments.
3. Repeating those controlled experiments.
4. Using the results of those experiments to form a theory.

My experiment was inspired last Friday, September 23, as I strolled by Williams Avenue Park in the morning and observed what looked like a gang tagging. I won’t get into the specifics of the content; suffice it to say that I think that topic is best pursued offline.

Williams Avenue Park was a neglected dumping ground when I first moved here in 2004. Last summer and fall, a group of Williams Avenue residents, the Facebook group Playsafe Lynn and the East Lynn Community Association sponsored 2 cleanups, a movie night and a bulb planting. For the first time in years, the city stationed several summer youth counselors to provide games and activities for the neighborhood kids and erected a new fence. A new playground structure may be in the offing. (Alas, this summer, I did not see any counselors)

Many people have put in a lot of work into resurrecting this park. It looks as if it may be sliding back into the hands of decay and neglect.

To get back to the experimental model, following are my recorded observations. I admit I do not have a control group.

1. 9/23/11 – visited city website to look up graffiti hotline. Gave it a call, but did not get through by following the instructions displayed on the web page. Filled out and submitted the feedback form instead.
2. Called my Ward Councillor, Darren Cyr. Left message.
3. Emailed two people in the Williams Ave. neighborhood who spearheaded the cleanup last year. Reply from Eliana Runyon, who is on the board of the ELCA. She expresses desire to fix and will follow-up.
4. 9/26/11 – Decided to give the hotline another try. Figured it out this time! What the instructions do not say is that you need to press 2 at the first prompt before you can press 8 at the second to reach the hotline. I leave a message and almost immediately receive a call from a polite woman (forget her name; should have written it down then and there.) who wants to make sure she understands the location. She informs me that the DPW passes information obtained by the hotline onto the Essex County Sheriff’s Office. They have a machine that can remove graffiti.
5. 10/1/11 – walked by Williams Ave. park. Graffiti is still there. Still no response from Ward Councillor.

The results of this experiment: inconclusive. That is, I don’t want to jump to any conclusions, such as Darren is ignoring me or the Sheriff’s Office must be too busy to bother with such a small park. Not enough information yet. In the past, Darren has acted on my behalf but not gotten back to me in what I would consider a timely manner. I don’t think a week with no action or response is unacceptable. Still, I’ve heard it said that immediately removing graffiti is the best way to deal with it. (For readers wondering about the cognitive therapy angle, “jumping to conclusions” is a cognitive distortion  that may contribute to depression.)

The results of this one experiment are inconclusive thus far, but I can’t help but start to formulate a theory that an experimental approach like this might not only increase the mental health of a city’s residents, but force city and county officials to be held more accountable.

I dare to make this statement because I’ve learned that writing things down and recording details helps one build a case. In the field of social work, if you don’t write and keep records of what you learn in interviews about a client, grave mistakes can be made down the road. Documentation is so important that beneficial social programs can and should be stopped so that caseworkers can catch up with it. What is learned about a client at the beginning of the intake process can have devastating consequences if it is not passed on to social workers downstream.

If you’re part of a neighborhood crime watch, it is critical to write your observations of any criminal activity and pass them on to the authorities. More and better information leads to successful arrests.

Many local experiments in government responsiveness are in progress or have already taken place. The one I keep returning to as a textbook example is the amazing progress made on improving the safety of the Central Square Commuter Rail Station downtown a couple of years ago. Here are some others:

Because We’ve Come so Far (a little public shaming)

Tons of Empty Storefronts…Well sort of

Dropout Rates by Selected Population III: SES

Just remember to control for variables. The variable with the most influence I can see is that it’s an election year. Don’t forget to vote.

Plovers huddle on Red Rock waiting for the tide to go back out.

So beautiful a morning it was, I just had to venture out and enjoy it. Compelled is too weak a word; something deep inside my being urged me to take advantage of this precious summer-like day. The forecast called for misty rain, but I could not see a cloud in the sky. These days will be missed.

As I walked past Red Rock with Sheena, I noticed something odd about the texture of the rock. A split second later, I resolved the oddity into a compact grouping of plovers waiting for the tide to go back out so they could forage. I know some people don’t care too much for plovers, especially the endangered ones that insist on nesting on prime beach real estate. Me, I like plovers, love to watch them flit across the surf at sunset.

Try out the full screen effect! There are also views of inside the Observatory, Lynn Auditorium, Gannon Golf Course and a few others.

On the other hand, the primary for at-large city council will matter. There are 10 candidates for at-large. You cannot vote for more than 4, and the top 8 vote getters will move on to the primary. I sincerely hope that both Calvin Anderson and Hong Net make it to the general. I think they both have great ideas and have met each one personally. I’ve linked to their websites so you can read what they stand for.

Here are some additional links to help you make your decisions:

Downtown Lynn’s At-large councillor 2011 series

ELCA Councillor At large and school committee debates taped by Lynn Happens.

City of Lynn Elections and Voting webpage

Polls open at 7 and close at 8.

Here’s a great story about a community coming together in the face of fear and uncertainty. It was written by David Crowley, founder of SCI or Social Capital Inc. SCI is based in Woburn, but it has an outpost here in Lynn called SCI Lynn.  The Lynnside Edition started as a blog on the SCI Lynn website. So I guess I have David to thank in some way for the genesis of this blog. If you read the linked post, you’ll see that David was partly inspired by the events of 9/11.