Get out the vote, Suffolk Co.
Today's primary will select the Suffolk sherrif, since there's no Republican running. Your options are 1) the incumbent Andrea Cabral, who seems to be doing a reasonable job, and 2) current Councilman Stephen Murphy.

As a recent transplant, I can't claim to be an authority on Mr. Murphy's character, but I did witness him scurry out of Doyle's a few months ago. He was trying to avoid eye contact with a perfectly innocuous young woman who had been involved in the dioxin resolution that had recently been debated in the city council. Murphy stood out in those debates as one of the few councillors who took the dioxin industry's lobbyists more seriously than Boston's public health community. I can only guess that his unpopular move was weighing heavily on his conscience that evening.

Of course, there are also the publisher's clearinghouse style giant fake checks that Murphy has been handing out to local communities in the name of homeland security funding, even though those communities don't actually get the money (Boston does) and though Murphy has almost nothing to do with how the funds are spent. And, to top it off, Murphy's no-shows to debates scheduled with Cabral.
[/politics]

You Will be Assimilated
...if google has anything to say about it. Not content to be the main intermediary between us and humanity's collective on-line knowledge, google is now hell-bent on indexing all of our personal communications as well. I have come to this conclusion after logging into gmail three or four times; I've only sent one message from the account, and they're already trying to have me invite six more people into their data-mining operation. It's like a pyramid scheme, but instead of taking our money, google wants our hopes, dreams, fears, and salable demographic info. Of course the person who gets others involved doesn't get a cut, so it isn't really a pyramid scheme.

At least, that's what the paranoid side of my brain says. Others may see things differently, so if there's anybody out there not yet colonized by the gmail empire who wants a free, fast webmail account with lots of storage space that will also make your personal info available to a newly-public search company, drop me a note.
[/general]