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http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0316/news-shapiro2.php
• The first two e-mails I received in response covered a range of reactions:
"Those who decry the salaries of CEO complain of greed, while indulging in greed's close relative - jealousy. Furthermore, if these CEO's made the same amount of money but gave sizable portions to charity, would there still be an issue?"
"I was troubled by the final paragraph of that section of your blog. I would guess that among your readers are a fair number of evangelicals and political conservatives, but the apparently obligatory need to close the section by stating that one is not aligning oneself with the "quasi-Marxist Left" or liberals was deflating. Is your readership really that incapable of seeing ethically bad behavior for what it is and calling a spade a spade, without running it through their political litmus test first (i.e. "Does this sound too liberal?")?"
• John Hancock CEO's salary comes under fire, from the Boston Globe.
PLACES & CULTUREFrom the Washington Post:
BHOPAL, India—Digvijay Singh is by most accounts a modern-minded man. Educated as an engineer, the urbane and aristocratic chief minister of the state of Madhya Pradesh has won international recognition for his efforts on conservation, Internet access in rural areas, and affirmative action for women and the lowest castes. How, then, to explain his recent infatuation with cow urine?. … "There's a tremendous medicinal value," he said, adding that cow urine also makes "an excellent pesticide" when combined with leaves from India's ubiquitous neem tree. … Cows and cow products are sacred to Hindus, who represent 82 percent of India's billion-plus people. Touting the wonders of cow urine, analysts say, is part of Singh's strategy to neutralize the appeal of the Hindu-nationalist doctrine— called "Hindutva"—at the core of the BJP's platform. More broadly, it is an example of how the Hindu-nationalist agenda is coming to dominate political discourse in India, drowning out debate on other topics and sowing doubts about the country's future as a secular, pluralistic democracy.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13796-2003May4.html
On an ordinary Friday about 7 p.m., Matthew Medford dropped his wife off at Logan International Airport, but instead of heading north to the comfort of his suburban home, Medford took a detour. He found himself speeding through the bowels of the dark city and across the Charles River on a bridge illuminated by soft bluish lights—and is still in awe of the experience … Fast and easy—in a city of lousy directions, crazy drivers and insidious traffic jams, Medford's drive seemed almost un-Bostonian. Yet his experience has begun to be repeated thousands of times a day as the promise of the Big Dig—officially known as the Central Artery/Tunnel Project—has finally begun to be fulfilled. The nation's largest highway project, which is burying Interstate 93 with significantly increased capacity underneath downtown Boston, opened a major tunnel in January linking the airport in South Boston to the Massachusetts Turnpike and siphoning thousands of cars off the city's center roads. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41324-2003Apr16.html
Related:Big Dig's pace, price is a cautionary tale, says the Boston Globe.
SCRAPBOOKTwo items clipped from the Canadian Globe and Mail:
• The U.S. flag is required to follow a 10-to-19 height-to-length ratio, according to a 1912 ruling by President William Taft. But hardly any do, notes Whitney Smith of Winchester, Mass., founder of the Flag Research Center (and said-to-be coiner of the term "vexillology," or the study of flags). "You'll find manufacturers are going to make what[ever] they want," which is usually a ratio of either 2-to-3, 3-to-5, or 5-to-8, he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The exception, he added, are Stars and Stripes flags made in Canada, where all flags are made in the elongated 1-to-2 ratio. In other words, the commercially available American flags that most closely resemble the "real" thing are all made in Canada.
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