"Comparing him to Obama, though, I LOVE the big old lug"

Chelsea Chamber of Commerce automobiles go tire to tire with earth-moving equipment across the street at Eastern Salt as respectable local business people take off on a cruise of Boston Inner Harbor to embrace for a few hours the "ephemerality, cacophony, multiplicity and simultaneity of Everyday Urbanism.

"I think that the years of captivity truly rattled his brain, as it would," writes our imail correspondent, taking the ball of Daniel Henninger's rhetorical "Is John McCain Stupid?" and running with it:

I think he's an idiot, in many ways. Comparing him to Obama, though, I LOVE the big old lug.

That's pretty much where we've been as of late in this disingenuously who-me? race-bating race from Hell, from the moment in December of 2006 that we got a glimpse of the cynical heart of darkness that is Barack Obama's game plan. That so many of our fellow Americans are buyin' his snake oil reminds us of how nothing changes but the date. McCain's new "Celeb" ad linking Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Barack Obama was a breath of fresh air to those of us on the right side of the aisle. The shock, shock and outrage of our friends on the other side of the aisle told us the McCain folks had hit a nerve.

"I have a blogpost in mind but haven't found the mental space to pursue it," we further imailed our sis, following a blow-by-blow accounting of a day of wall-to-wall cooking in preparation for the après ski  part of Saturday's Eastern Minerals Maritime Festival:

She: What is rattling the cell?

We: Having to do with that walkable neighborhoods thing and a ridiculous Chelsea Record article about Eastern Minerals' Maritime Festival. The first paragraph is right out of the liberal playbook.

She: Oh, no. Is the Record panning it already?

We: And I quote: "Chelsea's working waterfront can often seem like an unfriendly, uniniviting place." They introduce the concept with boilerplate anti-salt and then go on to praise the events: "Heavy machinery, mountainous piles of road salt and large seagoing ships are among the drawbacks that make the waterfront a less than ideal place to go for a stroll or take a leisurely walk. However, that will change this weekend as the Eastern Salt Company plays host to the Sixth Annual Eastern Salt Maritime Festival."

The search for beauty in unexpected places that is the essence of our worldview and the paradigm of Everyday Urbanism eludes the close-minded, inside-the-box thinkers of what we have called the "permanently angry folk of the Chelsea Green Space and Recreation Committee, who 'demand' that Eastern Minerals 'find an alternative site for the salt' and 'any remaining salt be covered with a solid structure, as required by state law.'" Chelsea Record reporter Joseph Domelowicz, Jr. appears to have bought their story, no questions asked. One man's drawbacks are another's romance of the sea.

More about "walkable neighborhoods" — ours is "Very Walkable" and Goomp's Camelot-by-the-Sea" is "Car-Dependant" according to Walk Score's algorithm —and how they may make you fat or thin as soon as we come up for air.

Comments

[goomp]

It is time for clueless Greens and other assorted Liberals to take a walk. A walk down the halls of reality. Of course care should be and is taken not to caerlessly disrupt and pollute the environment, but to think the world can be a well groomed botanical garden and still provide a world in which we can survive is ridiculous. Go and experience nature in the wild and see if you can even exist. Newspapers have pretty well outlived their usefulness in this day of the internet. My only use for them is as a source of free linings for cabinet floors. Send the Chelsea Reocrd a few of your photos of the salt dock as a source of "Beauty in Unexpected Places".

[Teresa]

So if the "beautification" pushers manage to push Eastern Mineral out of Chelsea... have they told anyone how the tax money from the company (that I'm sure is quite a nice chunk of change) will be recouped?

Nah - let's not think about such mundane things as money to run the city when we can "beautify" it. After all, they can then just raise everyone's taxes - right? First raise them to cover the huge gaping hole left by the company no longer being there to pay. Then raise them again to cover turning the "eyesore" into a park... yada, yada, yada...

These people make me tired.

[MissJean]

I am confounded by the anti-salt comment. Here in the Great Lakes State, a big portion of our economy is still based on shipping. Cargill Salt is just down the shoreline from the riverside park in St. Clair, MI. It's part of the charm of the area, including freighters, loading docks, and even the traffic delays caused by drawbridges!

I got a giggle out of the comment about "drawbacks that make the waterfront a less than ideal place to go for a stroll or take a leisurely walk." One of my favorite places to walk around here is a trail through a preserved section of marsh and natural prairie, but the drawbacks include mosquitos, wild animals (it's one thing to see a coyote or buck in a field; quite another to turn a bend and find one within 10 feet), and ankle-twisting animal holes. It's been my experience that when urban people speak of "walker-friendly" parks along the river, they mean landscaping with pavement, plantings of non-native plants, and using herbicides and nitrogen-based fertilizer that harm the watershed.