Debate tonight

Tonight's debate will feature yours truly vs. Heather in a battle of wits regarding the recently developed home decorating platform and also FY2007 laundry policies. I am the early front runner, but you can never count out Heather due to her superior intelligence and good looks.

Wait, that's not right, the real debate is Healy-Patrick at 6 p.m. on Fox. I can't wait, I hope Patrick shows her up. This gubernatorial campaign, much like the last two Presidential campaigns, has the potential for the Republicans to capitalize on the short-sightedness of the American electorate, making me want to move to Canada. That shouldn't happen in Massachusetts, of all places. We'll see.

Global warming

Virgin businessman and billionaire Richard Branson pledged about $1 billion to fight global warming at Clinton's environmental summit. Well that's exciting and inspiring, and I applaud the announcement.

But...air travel has a major impact on global warming. Obviously it's impractical to not fly anywhere anymore, so I think Mr. Branson's committment to work toward renewable, sustainable energy sources without a conflict of interest will be quite a challenge.

MV

After spending the weekend on the Vineyard for Heather's friend Stacy's wedding, I kept seeing parallels between Oak Bluffs and Seaside. The narrow, winding streets and organic mish-mash of seemingly residual spaces turned into small pocket parks and the larger planned greens:



the tightly knit neighborhoods of homes with porches lining the streets:




and mostly, the 7 acre green on the ocean, which seemed to be the grand-daddy of Seaside's much smaller green:


Great stuff. I liked Oak Bluffs' victorian charm over the colonial stateliness of Edgartown, but hey, that's just me. It was a great weekend, but I'm glad to be home for a while with no travel plans.

Wayne's wisdom

There are too many things that require you to be smart. If you can't surrender to the stupid thing that is rock 'n' roll, what good is life?

- Wayne Coyne, the Flaming Lips

Politics

Check out this cool map boston.com cooked up showing campaign contributions linked to address. There has to be better uses for this mapping technology. Zillow is a similar application, showing estimated home values (with links to tons of data) overlaid on an aerial photo.

By the way, Kerry Healy's tv campaign ad lists her primary objectives as suspending the gas tax and rolling back the income tax. Way to advertise yourself as a short-sighted politician. I first saw this ad at the gym and I almost fell off the treadmill.