Virginia bans smiles at the DMV

As part of the DMV's effort to develop super-secure driver's licenses and foolproof identification cards, the agency has issued a smile ban, directing customers to adopt a "neutral expression" in their portraits, thereby extinguishing whatever happiness comes with finally hearing one's number called.

The driver's license photo, it seems, is destined to look like a mug shot.

DMV officials say the smile ban is for a good cause. The agency would like to develop a facial recognition system that could compare customers' photographs over time to prevent fraud and identity theft.

"The technology works best when the images are similar," said DMV spokeswoman Pam Goheen. "To prepare for the possibility of future security enhancements, we're asking customers to maintain a neutral expression."

Boston Globe: Five classics revisited

I love this article, because these restaurants are mythical to me -- I hardly even know anyone who has been to them, nevermind go myself, they're that exclusive.

In a newspaper, you expect to read about new, dare I say, "hot," restaurants.
After all, the chic Bostonian eco-foodie needs to know where to strike a pose this week. Where is everyone dining on terrine de mango with parsnip and urchin-roe foam?

But this in-with-the-new hype tends to overlook iconic restaurants - Boston institutions really - the places that spring to mind when you think about dining out here, the ones that make you feel like a Kennedy or a tourist hoping to run into a Kennedy.

These are the restaurants that still manage, after years - in some cases, centuries - to fill the house if not nightly, then certainly on weekends.

A sterling reputation can rest on its laurels, even as it raises an obvious question about change: If something's been working for 97 years, why adjust it?

New Bedford has a winery?

Think globally, act locally: Now it's even easier to do that when it comes to booze, thanks to the Travessia Urban Winery.

They're located in downtown New Bedford, drawing on the Portuguese heritage of the founding vintners to craft seven varietals. They offer four white wines -- Unoaked Chardonnay, Chardonnay, Vidal Blanc and Sweet Vidal Blanc -- and three reds: Pinot Noir, Merlot, and Cabernet Franc.

They even offer a free Wine Club, membership in which gives a 10% discount on Travessia product, and free, monthly "geekdom" courses in Wine 101.
What's not to like?

New Yorker cover "painted" with iphone

Damn, the app is $4.99....but I seriously think I need it.

Read more here in Gizmodo.

Great news at WCVB

Says the Globe:


Is Randy Price returning to TV?
Sources says Price, who abruptly left WHDH-TV (Channel 7) in February after 12 years, is being considered for an anchor/reporter position at WCVB-TV (Channel 5).
Word is Price, one of New England's most familiar on-air faces, will do test shots today. (The job's been vacant since Jim Boyd left at the end of the year.)
Price's departure from Channel 7 was characterized by station boss Ed Ansin as a "mutual agreement," but it's clear the former anchor isn't ready to retire. . . .

One person who is coming back is Liz Walker. The former WBZ-TV anchor, who left Channel 4 at the end of '08, has a deal with Channel 5 to host a series called "Better Living With Liz Walker."
Underwritten by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, the program will air once per quarter and be produced by Walker's production company.
The first in the series airs June 4.

I am despondent

And I know Dan Shaughnessy is too.
"Incredibly, they've been outlasted by the Celtics, once again."
I'm so upset that I borderline can't rally behind the Celts. But I will.

Pottery Barn is latest to quit Newbury St.

Newbury Street is in trouble.

After two decades on Newbury Street, home furnishings chain Pottery Barn is moving out of its digs, the latest in a series of merchants to exit the Back Bay retail district.

The Boston Globe says declining sales and high rents squeeze shops.

"We will not be renewing the lease in this location. Our plans for additional Pottery Barn stores in the area are not clear, and so therefore I am not able to speculate," spokeswoman Stephanie O'Brien said.

Earlier this year, Pottery Barn left South Shore Plaza in Braintree, along with its sister chain Williams-Sonoma.
The parent company, Williams-Sonoma Inc., took a series of actions recently to slash costs, including cutting the workforce by 18 percent, closing a call center in Pennsylvania, and shuttering a distribution facility in Tennessee. Pottery Barn still operates stores in the Atrium at Chestnut Hill and the Burlington Mall.

Still, the departure of Pottery Barn from Newbury Street, with more than 7,200 square feet, will leave a large hole in this Back Bay shopping mecca, which has been hit hard by the current recession.

Many store owners have blamed declining sales and exorbitant rents for their struggles in what used to be Boston's hottest address for trendy boutiques.

In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars

VAUBAN, Germany — Residents of this upscale community are suburban pioneers, going where few soccer moms or commuting executives have ever gone before: they have given up their cars.

Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders.

Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community.

Car ownership is allowed, but there are only two places to park — large garages at the edge of the development, where a car-owner buys a space, for $40,000, along with a home.

As a result, 70 percent of Vauban’s families do not own cars, and 57 percent sold a car to move here.

“When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two, as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor.

Vauban, completed in 2006, is an example of a growing trend in Europe, the United States and elsewhere to separate suburban life from auto use, as a component of a movement called “smart planning.”

To make sure that residents can live in Vauban without a car, it is a "mixed use" community: stores, banks and restaurants are sprinkled along the main street of Vauban, and that street is within walking distance of all homes. In many traditional suburbs, houses are in areas that are purely residential, according to zoning laws. Stores and banks are often distant, requiring a car ride.

For energy efficiency, the houses in Vauban, which was completed in 2006, are all row houses. Freestanding homes, like those in traditional suburbs, consume huge amounts of energy because of their exterior walls. Many houses in Vauban were built to passive house standard, meaning they are so well designed to conserve heat -- through insulation and other innovations -- that they do not need heating systems at all.

"They Had It Made"

In the late 1930s, a group of 268 promising young men, including John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee, entered Harvard College. By any normal measure, they had it made. They tended to be bright, polished, affluent and ambitious. They had the benefit of the world’s most prestigious university. They had been selected even from among Harvard students as the most well adjusted.

And yet the categories of journalism and the stereotypes of normal conversation are paltry when it comes to predicting a life course. Their lives played out in ways that would defy any imagination save Dostoyevsky’s. A third of the men would suffer at least one bout of mental illness. Alcoholism would be a running plague. The most mundane personalities often produced the most solid success. One man couldn’t admit to himself that he was gay until he was in his late 70s.

The men were the subject of one of the century’s most fascinating longitudinal studies. They were selected when they were sophomores, and they have been probed, poked and measured ever since. Researchers visited their homes and investigated everything from early bed-wetting episodes to their body dimensions.

The results from the study, known as the Grant Study, have surfaced periodically in the years since. But they’ve never been so brilliantly captured as they are in an essay called “What Makes Us Happy?” by Joshua Wolf Shenk in the forthcoming issue of The Atlantic. (The essay is available online today.)

New York Times: Is My Marriage Gay?

This made my head spin, thus I am reprinting the entire thing:

May 12, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Is My Marriage Gay?

By JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN


AS many Americans know, last week Gov. John Baldacci of Maine signed a law that made this state the fifth in the nation to legalize gay marriage. It’s worth pointing out, however, that there were some legal same-sex marriages in Maine already, just as there probably are in all 50 states. These are marriages in which at least one member of the couple has changed genders since the wedding.

I’m in such a marriage myself and, quite frankly, my spouse and I forget most of the time that there is anything particularly unique about our family, even if we are — what is the phrase? — “differently married.”

Deirdre Finney and I were wed in 1988 at the National Cathedral in Washington. In 2000, I started the long and complex process of changing from male to female. Deedie stood by me, deciding that her life was better with me than without me. Maybe she was crazy for doing so; lots of people have generously offered her this unsolicited opinion over the years. But what she would tell you, were you to ask, is that the things that she loved in me have mostly remained the same, and that our marriage, in the end, is about a lot more than what genders we are, or were.

Deirdre is far from the only spouse to find herself in this situation; each week we hear from wives and husbands going through similar experiences together. Reliable statistics on transgendered people always prove elusive, but just judging from my e-mail, it seems as if there are a whole lot more transsexuals — and people who love them — in New England than say, Republicans. Or Yankees fans.

I’ve been legally female since 2002, although the definition of what makes someone “legally” male or female is part of what makes this issue so unwieldy. How do we define legal gender? By chromosomes? By genitalia? By spirit? By whether one asks directions when lost?

We accept as a basic truth the idea that everyone has the right to marry somebody. Just as fundamental is the belief that no couple should be divorced against their will.

For our part, Deirdre and I remain legally married, even though we’re both legally female. If we had divorced last month, before Governor Baldacci’s signature, I would have been allowed on the following day to marry a man only. There are states, however, that do not recognize sex changes. If I were to attempt to remarry in Ohio, for instance, I would be allowed to wed a woman only.

Gender involves a lot of gray area. And efforts to legislate a binary truth upon the wide spectrum of gender have proven only how elusive sexual identity can be.

The case of J’noel Gardiner, in Kansas, provides a telling example. Ms. Gardiner, a postoperative transsexual woman, married her husband, Marshall Gardiner, in 1998. When he died in 1999, she was denied her half of his $2.5 million estate by the Kansas Supreme Court on the ground that her marriage was invalid. Thus in Kansas, any transgendered person who is anatomically female is now allowed to marry only another woman.

Similar rulings have left couples in similar situations in Florida, Ohio and Texas. A 1999 ruling in San Antonio, in Littleton v. Prange, determined that marriage could be only between people with different chromosomes. The result, of course, was that lesbian couples in that jurisdiction were then allowed to wed as long as one member of the couple had a Y chromosome, which is the case with both transgendered male-to-females and people born with conditions like androgen insensitivity syndrome. This ruling made Texas, paradoxically, one of the first states in which gay marriage was legal.

A lawyer for the transgendered plaintiff in the Littleton case noted the absurdity of the country’s gender laws as they pertain to marriage:
“Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.”

Legal scholars can (and have) devoted themselves to the ultimately frustrating task of defining “male” and “female” as entities fixed and unmoving. A better use of their time, however, might be to focus on accepting the elusiveness of gender — and to celebrate it. Whether a marriage like mine is a same-sex marriage or some other kind is hardly the point. What matters is that my spouse and I love each other, and that our legal union has been a good thing — for us, for our children and for our community.

It’s my hope that people who are reluctant to embrace same-sex marriage will see that it has been with us, albeit in this one unusual circumstance, for years. Can we have a future in which we are more concerned with the love a family has than with the sometimes unanswerable questions of gender and identity? As of last week, it no longer seems so unthinkable.

As we say in Maine, you can get there from here.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is a professor of English at Colby College and the author of the memoir “I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/opinion/12boylan.html?th&emc=th

Too Fat for the Boy Scouts? New Weight Requirement Angers Some

Larry Armstrong has been volunteering with his local Boy Scout branch for years, chaperoning trips, serving on the council committee, even becoming certified in archery instruction for a day camp.

But Armstrong, at 6-foot, 2-inches tall and about 370 pounds, may no longer qualify for some scout outings because he's overweight, part of a new push by the national organization to ensure the scouts and their volunteers are healthy.

A new mandatory weight requirement by the national Boy Scouts of America that will take effect next January has some longtime volunteers concerned they will be left out of trips they've enjoyed with their sons for years.

According to the chart outlined in the national health and medical record form, Armstrong's weight must come down to a minimum of 239 pounds before he'll be allowed on certain "high adventure" trips that take him more than 30 minutes away from emergency care by ground transportation.

"It looks like they're trying to get the perfect person," said Armstrong, who volunteers with Troop 458 out of Chapmansboro, Tenn. "And that's not going to happen."

Next notice for Manny: An eviction?

LA TIMES: The slugger is a selfish player who can no longer be trusted.





Manny Ramirez dropped a bomb on Mannywood on Thursday, leveling the Dodgers' spirit, stripping the Dodgers' psyche, and blowing up the Dodgers' safe. He has been suspended for 50 games after testing positive for a banned substance.

The Dodgers can't build their team on fakery. They can't march to a championship behind a charlatan. They can't fall for his act again.

He must come clean to teammates he turned into fools.

He must come clean to the front office he robbed, owner Frank McCourt and General Manager Ned Colletti, offering sincere apologies followed by sincere explanations.

Finally, he must take this truth to the streets, becoming the Dodgers' anti-steroid spokesman for kids who listen.