It's all about the Ws: The Herald confuses Waltham and Watertown

More sloppy reporting, this time in the Boston Herald. The news article is about a corporate whistleblower named Paul Carpilio, who used to work for a big mutual fund company named Putnam Investments. Carpilio apparently uncovered a scheme to overstaff a Putnam customer service center, which allegedly resulted in big bonuses for greedy Putnam executives.

Corporate bigwigs feathering their own nests through trickery and mismanagement? No surprise there. But the Herald made a slip as to the origins of Mr. Carpilio, which makes me wonder about the accuracy of the other "facts" listed in the article. Check this:

The Waltham native just traded his black double-breasted suits for chinos and a brown leather bomber jacket. This month he opened the deli in a Plymouth industrial park to keep the money flowing when he isn’t consulting for other companies - or shuttling his three kids to hockey or soccer practice.

Then, at the bottom of the article:

As for Carpilio, money, he says, is not what he’s after.

“Where I come from, it’s about respect,” the Watertown native says. “I give respect, and I expect to be respected back.”

Well, Mr. Carpilio, you just got disrespected big time. The Herald can't even get your hometown right!

H2Otown's election blogging experiment, and an invitation to interview

Hmmm. Lisa over at H2Otown always has something interesting going on with the blog. I see tonight that it's an effort to welcome campaigners into the online community.

There are a lot of rules the contestants and their staffs have to follow, but they seem fair and geared toward starting a decent, honest conversation.

Borderline has talked about local elections before, like this entry, but I saved my analysis for after the fact -- I frankly don't want to endorse a candidate based on a limited amount of information I get from the Newton Tab, The News Tribune, and flyers that get dropped off in my mailbox. Very few local pols have emailed me, perhaps because Borderline occaisionally rips their heads off.

But Borderline will do interviews with any Waltham or Newton pol that wants to. I did one before with a local activist in Newton, and found that the format worked well. There are a couple simple ground rules, and they include that Borderline picks all the questions, the pol has the right not to answer a question but that fact will be noted in the transcript, the pol has to answer himself or herself (Borderline is good at spotting fakes) and ALL of the pols answers will be printed, except for profanity or things that could get Borderline in trouble. If you want to be interviewed, send Borderline an email.

Just what Waltham doesn't need -- A Big Box Lowe's On River Street

I can't believe this is even being considered. A big-box Lowe's Home Improvement store in a place that already has major traffic problems -- The River Street/ex-Raytheon area, right on the Watertown line. The News Tribune has the details, including furious neighborhood reaction.

"That's not going to work in our neighborhood," homeowner Chris Hayes said to applause from his neighbors. "The traffic is already brutal."

Several residents mentioned traffic and loud trucks brought in by a recently built Shaw's supermarket on River Street. They said major retail on River Street is too damaging to the nearby Warrendale and Rangeley Acres neighborhoods, and some said office buildings would be preferable.

They are absolutely right. There already is too much traffic there, and the streets around that site, many of them one lane in each direction, are not meant to handle thousands of extra cars and trucks every day. People with families live there. I cross River Street all the time at that intersection to go to Dunkin's with my kids.

There's another thing that the News Tribune failed to mention: Just down the road, across the Watertown line on Pleasant Street (aka, across from Russos) someone is building a big-box condo development. Guess how many extra cars that monstrosity is going to bring to the area once it opens? There's only two easy ways to get there, Pleasant Street and River Street in Waltham.

Here's my suggestion to Waltham citizens: Let your councilmen know what you think about the Lowe's juggernaut destroying this neighborhood, and let them know that they need to put up a fight, instead of sucking up to developers.

Street life comes to Watertown - the Waltham connections

H2Otown has a post about the problems plaguing a certain neighborhood in Watertown, not too far from the Belmont and Waltham borders. The problems allegedly include drug dealing, and a recent drive-byish shooting.

There are two Waltham connections with this story. The alleged perps were caught by Waltham police after a Waltham officer heard the APB go out over Watertown police radio, and pulled over the vehicle in Waltham.

The other Waltham connection is one of the perps is a Waltham resident by the name of Herbert Bonds of 1000 Lexington St. in Waltham. Bonds has at least one other arrest, judging by this January 25 report from the Boston Police blog:

At 2:52am this morning officers from District 1 responded to Warrenton Place for a person hit by car. The victim, a 48-year-old male working as a parking lot attendant, told the officers that he was attempting to break up a fight when a white Cadillac SUV struck him. The suspect vehicle fled the scene and was stopped on Kneeland Street by a Detail Officer. The driver, 34-year-old Herbert Bonds of Waltham, and passenger, 28-year-old Alexis Martinez of Lowell, were arrested for Leaving the Scene of a Personal Injury Accident and Reckless Operation. The Cadillac SUV was seized as evidence and towed. Arraignment is today in Boston Municipal Court.

On a completely unrelated note to Mr. Bonds, H2Otown, in the course of talking about bad tenants contributing to crime in Watertown, also trashes a great Michael Keaton movie called Pacific Heights.

Pacific Heights is about the special terrors of being a landlord. It features a tenant who rips off every piece of molding and sells it, starts fires, deliberately releases cockroaches, and violently intimidates the landlord, all in a bid to drive them out of the house and get it cheap. Every time I've signed a lease, I've had a brief flash, a moment of wishing that I were on the other side of the lease again, a tenant whose housing mistakes are easily reversible by logging on to Craigslist and finding some new digs. As a landlord I've been exceptionally lucky, but like all landlords, I have that moment of doubt when a stranger becomes a tenant.

Pacific Heights is a bad movie; and it's as believable as any featuring Michael Keaton, Melanie Griffith, and power tools is likely to be. But there isn't a landlord on the planet who can watch it without getting the chills.

What do you mean, "bad movie"? Borderline loved the cockroach scene!