Please help support Barry Scott!

I blog for a lot of reasons…to blow off steam, to talk about my life, voice my opinions, and even earn some money.  But I also like to use my blogs for good, to promote causes I believe in.

That is what this post is about.

If you are in the greated Boston area, you have probably heard of Barry Scott.  He is a DJ who hosts The Lost 45s, every Sunday night from 7-11PM, on WODS.  The show features songs from the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s that you never hear on the radio anymore, except for on this show.  Barry also interviews many of the artists who created these records.  These are interviews that you’d never get to hear anywhere else.

I am a big fan of this show, and I try to tune in every week.  Years ago, Mike and I were listening, and he wondered if Barry would ever play Surfin’ Bird by the Trashmen.  Mike is weird, he loves that song.  So I picked up the phone and called.  And yes, Barry did play it!  Now, tell me, who else would play that song?

Anyway, Barry needs all the support he can get.  In July 2007, he was a victim of police brutality in Provincetown, MA.  Rather than repeat the whole story here, I direct you to a website set up by friends and supporters of Barry, so you can read all about what really happened.  Please click HERE, the link will open in a new tab/window.

Today, Barry sent out an email to his mailing list.  I’m sure he won’t mind if I post it here, I know he wants people to spread the word.

Hello. After weeks of consideration, I’ve decided to appeal the charges brought by the Provincetown Police and D.A. Michael O’Keefe to hide police brutality. Although there are many good cops, enabling the Provincetown Police to injure me, lie on official reports and in a court of law; makes them no better than criminals.

Any one of you, or your loved ones, can have an experience like I had last July in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I never thought I’d be smashed head first into the side of a house and kicked repeatedly, while not resisting, as a citizen in a private backyard, within one minute of meeting and obeying the police. By not taking further action, the police are getting away with an abuse of power that is inexcusable and allows them to tarnish the badges of good cops everywhere.

There are many reasons for an appeal. The arrest was invalid as the First Amendment protects one’s comments in a private backyard—as it should in yours. That’s called free speech, my friends.

Brian Merrick, the ‘judge’ in my case, allowed last minute testimony to miraculously appear; gave the wrong interpretation of the law; enabled homeowner Ed Foley of 4 Holway Avenue in Provincetown and Trillium Hair Salon in Boston (who could have shut his party down at any time) to lie under oath without cross examination and allowed a juror who later e-mailed about my innocence to go unquestioned!

For this and many other reasons involving what America truly means to me—I am going forward with an appeal. Although I only paid $690 in misdemeanor charges, I will continue to pay tens of thousands to correct my good name, ensure this does not happen to others and honor the Constitution of The United States.

Gary Pelletier and Brad Bailey of the prestigious law firm of Denner-Pellegrino will be representing me.  If you’d like to donate to help fund this costly process or learn more about this incident, please visit http://mysite.verizon.net/freebarryscott/provincetown.html

Save October 24th for a special Boston fundraiser starring a special musical guest!

Most Sincerely,
Barry Scott

This kind of thing cannot be allowed to go unchecked.  Provincetown is supposed to be a gay-friendly community.  Barry, who is openly gay, is not the only one who has been victimized by the police there.  Read the articles linked to on that website.  He is pushing forward with the appeal not just to clear his name, but to help keep this from happening to anyone else, ever again, be they gay or straight.

But, as he said in his email, this is going to cost a lot of money.  If you are so inclined, please make a donation at the website I linked to above.  You can mail a check or money order, or use PayPal.

There was a fund-raising event last April, and there will be another one in October.  You can keep up with what’s going on by visiting Lost45.com.  You can sign up for the mailing list there if you want to.

Finally…please know that comments are moderated here.  See my Comment Policy.  I will NOT tolerate any form of gay bashing or other hate speech.  If you were in my living room and made a comment like that, I would kick you out of my home.  Well, this is one of the rooms in my home on the web, and as such, I make the rules.  Free speech?  Sure, but just take it somewhere else.  Start your own blog and speak there.  You can get a free blog at blogger.com or wordpress.com.

Thank you for reading.  And good luck, Barry!

$20 for a box of 10 garbage bags

Lookee what we pissed away $20 on today…the official Malden garbage bags.  Aren’t you thrilled?  I knew you would be.

This coming week is the last week of free trash pickup for residents of this crap town.  As of Monday, October 6, if we don’t put our trash in these $2/a pop bags, we’ll be subject to fines.

There is so much wrong with this program, I don’t know where to begin.  But I’ll try.

My first concern is that I know damned well that most of the people who live around us will NOT be ponying up for these trash bags.  Hell, these people don’t even buy regular garbage bags, or garbage cans, for that matter.  They put their trash into plastic grocery bags, and put six million of them out on the sidewalk on garbage day.  Or, if they have cans, they don’t bother with bags at all, and just throw dirty diapers and other nasty trash directly into the outside cans.  These people always seem to have enough money for beer, cigarettes, nail salons, gold jewelry, orovo products, and the like…but they can’t even buy so much as cheap trash bags from the dollar store. No way are they gonna buy the $20/box ones.

Tell me, HOW is anyone gonna get these people to spend $20 on a box of garbage bags?  And how will they collect the fines and collection fees, if they don’t buy and use the bags?

According to THIS (Adobe Acrobat Reader required to see it), any trash that is NOT in the expensive blue bags will NOT be picked up, and, as I said, fined.  Wonderful…just what I need, the skeeves who are too cheap (or just plain can’t afford) to buy the bags will cause an infestation of rodents and such around here.  We already have had problems with raccoons and  skunks going into people’s garbage…now this will just make it worse.

I am also concerned about stealing.  What is to stop someone from dumping the trash out of our bags, taking the bags, and then causing US to be fined?  What is also to stop someone from just dumping their non-blue-bagged trash outside of our house, again, causing US to be fined?  How can we report anyone for this if they do it in the middle of the night when nobody is looking?

And what about the recycling containers?  We have one, our landladies got it for us.  They had to pay $5.00 for it, and another five bucks for their own.  What’s to stop some skeeve who won’t pony up the five bucks from stealing ours?  I could spray paint our address on it to keep people in the immediate area from stealing it, but what about drive-by thieves/trash dumpers and such?

And, for some minor rantage on this…I HATE STOP & SHOP!  At least the ones in Malden, which is where they sell these bags.  They sell them at other stores in town, as well, but none of them are places we normally shop at.  We only went there today to buy the stupid bags, we shop elsewhere for groceries, it is an unnecessary stop for us.  I also resent being forced to patronize stores we don’t like just to get the stupid bags.

I also hate drawstring trash bags, which is what these are.  The drawstring things always broke, even in Hefty and Glad bags, no doubt these will be just as bad.  I like my Glad Handle-Tie bags just fine.

Also, these new bags are 33 gallons, as opposed to the 13 gallon kitchen bags.  So I’m supposed to keep my trash in the house until the bigger bag is filled?  I’m afraid that if I try taking it out as usual, and then putting the smaller bags into the Expensive Blue Bag, the Trash Police might come by on a non-trash pickup day and ticket me.

Hell if I’m gonna do that!  I’m not going to keep stinky food waste trash in the house for up to a week.  But I’m also not going to put a less-than-full blue bag outside, either.

The mayor of Malden, Richard Howard, is a skeevy rich bastard who doesn’t give a rat’s behind about the residents here.  True story – several years ago, I was walking in Malden Square, crossing the street, and slipped on some ice on the street.  I almost got run over by this jackass in a big flashy asshole car.  A very nice gentleman, a fellow pedestrian, came to my aid and helped me up.  He said he had gotten a look at the driver of the car, and said it was the mayor himself.  The street I was crossing had snow on it that was all frozen over, no one ever plowed it.

This asshat has NO clue about the city he is in charge of.  He has no clue about the fact that there are a lot of low income people here who can’t afford $20 for a box of garbage bags.  That there are people who walk into Stop & Shop with a $20 bill, and are trying to buy as much food as they can with that.  Too bad they’ll have to spend it all on garbage bags now.  These are the people who, if they do bother to buy garbage bags, they go to Family Dollar and get them there.  A box for a dollar.

He also has no idea that there are a lot of skeevy people who CAN afford the bags, but won’t buy them anyway.  You know, the ones who have money for beer, ciggies, and nail salons.  I swear, Howard must LOVE nail salons.  You can’t swing a dead mayor in this town without hitting one.  There are so many of them, and they all must get business, otherwise, they’d be gone.  He must generate a lot of business tax money from these places.  In this town, the people who patronize them are likely the ones who can least afford them.  The bimbos with the fancy fake nails will be the ones dumping their trash on OUR curb.

I know, I’ve lived here long enough to know what my neighbors are like.

We should have gotten a loan when credit was easier to get, and bought a house in Maine or NH then.  But Mike didn’t want to, he wanted to wait, since our interest rate would have been higher due to scarred credit from the past.  He wanted to wait until that old stuff rolled off.  Now credit is almost impossible to get, no one would give us a loan now.  Even though we don’t plan to take on more house than we can pay for, and won’t fall for the adjustable rate mortgage thing.  So now we are stuck in this hellhole for the time being.

Malden sucks.  If you are thinking of moving here, DON’T.  And not just because of the trash bag thing.

Weekend in Sturbridge after all!

I had mentioned in my last post that the October 3-4-5 weekend in Sturbridge, to go to the members stuff and fall festivities at Old Sturbridge Village, was off.  Reason being that I had called our usual place to stay, the Heritage Motel, and it was fully booked.  I wasn’t sure if there was anyplace else good and cheap to stay there.  I sure do miss the Oliver Wight House, at OSV, which used to be lodgings.  But the Village shut down all of their on-site lodging, which is a major bummer.

Then I remembered this place on Route 20 that looked kind of nice from the outside, at least.  It used to be something else, I don’t remember now, but it’s now a Motel 6.  I checked out their website, and it is way cheaper than all of the hotels that got bad reviews on TripAdvisor, including the Super 8.  I’d always thought that Super 8 and Motel 6 were about the same, quality and price-wise.  But Super 8 is more expensive, as in about $15 a night more.  And that is with their AARP rate.

But the Sturbridge Motel 6 happened to have a special internet rate of about $60 per night.  We want to stay for two nights, we want to do it on the cheap, so this won.  I booked it.  It can’t be all that bad, this is Sturbridge, in the boonies, not some inner city place.

If this place is any good, we might stay there next January, when Mike wants to go to that giant train show out in West Springfield.  We stay in Sturbridge for that, as it’s almost all the way there, and we can do the Village, as well.  It’s also easier and cheaper to get rooms in Sturbridge than it is near the Big E place, where the train thing is held.

I never go to that show, he goes and I stay behind in the room at the Heritage.  Last year, I just sat in the room and drank beer and watched TV.  There’s a cool scrapbook store nearby, but I didn’t go there because it was on the other side of Route 20, and I didn’t feel like playing human Frogger to walk over there.  But the Motel 6 is on that side of the road, and I could easily walk to that store without getting killed.

There are other nice shops and stuff around, as well…everything from antiques to wholesale fashion jewelry to the most wicked awesome beer store in the world.

I’m so happy we will get to have our nice fall weekend in Sturbridge after all.  We can use a little 1830′s right about now!

Plans gone asunder

Well, we can’t go to Sturbridge over the October 3/4/5 weekend after all.  The hotel we like is fully booked, and I can’t find another place to stay that didn’t get mostly crappy reviews on TripAdvisor, that also doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.  So we’ll skip the fall fest stuff, and plan to go for the Christmas stuff at Old Sturbridge Village.

We had been planning to go on the fall foliage river cruise up in Portsmouth sometime this coming weekend.  But the forecast is calling for too much rain, that the boats probably will not run.  And who wants to be outside in the rain, anyway?  So maybe we can do it the weekend we were supposed to go to Sturbridge, hopefully, the weather will be nicer then, and the foliage colors, too.  Gotta make sure I have enough memory cards for all of the pictures I’ll want to take!
———-
If you tried to come to this site last night and it was wonky, I apologize. Some jerk hacked it and put links to porn sites in one of my WordPress templates, invisible to you, unless you look at the source code. Jerks, I hope they die, for causing me so much trouble.

My home town…

I’m entering a contest in which entrants must make videos about the towns they live in.  I live in Malden, MA, which has very little good going for it.  But I figure I can put a humorous spin on it somehow.  Maybe I can make video footage of stuff I complain about in my blogs…The Skeevy Corner Bar, The Skeevy Corner Store, The Evil Post Office, The Evil Stop & Shop.  Would I get in trouble for recording video inside The Evil Stop & Shop, showing that big stack of $20/box garbage bags (for ten garbage bags) that we will be forced to use come October?

I could also show the ball field two blocks away, the one that no one uses because theses kids are too busy playing in the middle of the street and blocking our driveway.  I could also do something about how the Halloween costume is all but extinct here…one of the reasons we quit giving out candy and vacating the premises on Halloween is because the greedy little trick-or-treaters can’t be bothered to wear costumes.  Where’s the fun in that?  If I’m gonna hand out treats, I want to see cool costumes.  Sorry, but dressing all in black is NOT a costume.

I know that a lot of other people who are entering this contest live in nice towns, and they can make really nice videos about them.  My only hope of winning this thing is to make it funny.

I am going to post the video here on this blog after it’s done.