About this time every year, Great White Sharks are spotted off of Martha's Vineyard. And about this time every year I think 5 miles from the coast might not be far enough.

My city in the NY Times! I remember noticing this question on the City's census form a couple months ago, but I didn't realize it was among the first in the nation...

Officials here want this Boston suburb to become the first city in the United States to systematically track people’s happiness. Like leaders in Britain, France and a few other places, they want to move beyond the traditional measures of success — economic growth — to promote policies that produce more than just material well-being.

To draw up its questions, Somerville turned to a neighbor, Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychology professor who wrote the 2006 best seller “Stumbling on Happiness.” Dr. Gilbert, who donated his time, is also helping the city do a more detailed telephone survey, using a randomized sample of Somerville’s 76,000 residents.

I'd never heard this story, but it just adds to the reason Kendrick Perkins was my second favorite Celtic. Big Baby Davis, is of course, first.

Via Long Reads

I'd probably watch this movie. Just kidding, I'd definitely watch this movie.

I always wanted to know what would happen if a truck carrying printer cartridges crashed, and it happened in my relative backyard!

Approximately 16,000 pounds of ink cartridges from the Flint Group, an Indianapolis-based company selling printing and packaging products, was bound for a newspaper company in Portland, Maine. Red, blue, and yellow ink cartridges were inside the truck, but Ferson said there is no evidence the yellow ink was released.

Via Wired

I've been doing a lot of food events around Boston the last year and a half or so, and I'm not sure how good of a job I do posting about them here. One of the things I've been working on is pop up restaurants. We were featured in a story in the Globe about our pop up in a coffee shop. For Valentine's Day Weekend, we're putting together a restaurant inside of a chocolate factory. Gotta say, that's a pretty good Valentine's idea, huh?

Here's a video of Big Baby Davis watching "Dunks of the Week". Click the Big Baby Davis tag below to see some more BBD awesomeness. I love this guy.



Via Simmons

Add Harvard's Kennedy School into the mix of colleges and universities teaching The Wire to their students. Here's an explanation of why that was published a couple weeks ago in the Washington Post.

To D'Angelo, the formal labor market is fundamentally unfair. People are not rewarded according to their true worth, and powerful institutions regularly exploit those with less power. Social inequality is the inevitable result -- the McNugget inventor doesn't get his due. "It ain't about right. It's about money," D'Angelo tells the young dealers.

Reminds me of the The Snot Boogie Rules. "Got to. It's America, man."

(Thanks, Dave!)

Recently, Tom Brady was in a car accident and all of New England held their breath. It turned out he was fine, but his car was pretty badly banged up. It turns out the $97K Audi S8, was a loaner vehicle registered to a non-profit, Best Buddies, on whose board Tom Brady sits. Is this an issue? Joanna Weiss in the Globe thinks it might be.

Audi is supporting Best Buddies by giving them loaner cars. Presumably, Audi wouldn't be replacing these cars with a check. Presumably, Best Buddies can't really use 12 $100K cars at once and lets their board members drive the left overs...

I just can't get fired up about this. Audi wanted to support an org by giving them cars. The org wants the support of the corporation and takes the cars. The board member drives one of these cars. Maybe it's not pure, but neither is it especially unethical. What do you think?

My latest @eatBoston event is today and tomorrow. Ice Cream Showdown! The best ice cream shops from the Boston area setting up in a parking lot to support deserving local organizations. This year is 2 days in 2 different parts of town. Full info including participants, T Shirts, etc at the link above.