Monthly Archives: December 2011

New Year’s revolution? [27 December 2011 / CCT ]

I wonder how many of us have on our list of New Year’s resolutions not just various items of personal makeover, but revolution itself? Talk about turning over a new leaf. This should be a dangerous time of year, bombarded as we are with the traditional Christmas movies with their essentially revolutionary message: Scrooge’s overthrow […]

Wellfleet’s new bylaw: referendum on the existing Dunkin’ Donuts [13 December 2011 / CCT]

“Wellfleet is runnin’ from Dunkin” went the headline for the story reporting our precedent- setting new bylaw banning formula restaurants (chains, franchises, non-local clones). The town approved it in last April’s town meeting and the attorney general recently signed off on it. Indeed, it was the sudden appearance in our very midst of a Dunkin’ […]

What’s Wrong with us? Some theories [September 2010 / CCT]

You hear it a lot these days: What’s wrong with us? with our country, with us as a people? There’s this sense that we ain’t the country we used to be. We’ve lost our mojo. Maureen Dowd in a recent column: “The country is having some weird mass nervous breakdown.” This malaise has been exacerbated […]

The view is clearer from a glass house [March 2010 / CCT]

A Harvard PhD with great promise guns down academic colleagues. A widely admired advocate against hate crimes gets a sexual charge from images of children being abused. One of the great athletes of our time with an exemplary public image turns out to have had numerous extra-maritial sexual affairs. The level of seriousness of differs […]

Kline house: open space trumps architecture [June 2010 / CCT]

It will be pretty amazing if the Truro ZBA does the right thing and actually orders the razing of the controversial Kline house. That would be a lot of deconstruction: 8300 square feet with, no doubt, a carbon footprint of Sasquatch size. In photos it looks to be substantially built, although various estimates have it […]

What, if anything, is Juan Williams guilty of? [November 2010 / CCT]

Juan Williams admits he gets nervous when a fellow passenger on a plane is wearing a Muslim outfit. In fact Williams, longtime news analyst on National P ublic Radio, was fired after making this confession to on The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News. The exact quote: “Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot…. But when I […]

In Wellfleet, a preference for architectural modesty [February 2010 / CCT]

How big should a house be? An intriguing question. There have been two well-attended public meetings recently in Wellfleet to discuss possible zoning limitations on house size in the non-Seashore part of town (restrictions for the Seashore were voted in last year). Most of those present seem to agree on one thing: we know too […]

D-Y should re-think special honoring of military enlistees [August 2010 / CCT]

Back to school: a time of fresh starts– fresh-scrubbed school, fresh-scrubbed students, teachers renewed by well-earned summer rest. Well, not everywhere. That happy picture is marred at Dennis-Yarmouth High School with the way last school year ended. At a June llth assembly in honor of seniors, while six students were honored with special plaques for […]

The poignancy of charity [December 2010 / CCT]

At this time of year we are tugged this way and that. The coldest season demands the warmest heart we can muster. The darkest time of year we confront with the brightest lights. The body assailed with flus and colds, we ask the spirit to rise to the occasion. This year the contradictions are especially […]

Wind power: flawed technology, tough trade-offs [November 2010 / CCT]

The battle over wind energy has reached a whole new level of ferocity now that turbines are being proposed for or built in actual backyards. For years opponents of industrializing Nantucket Sound argued that the logical and much less controversial place to put wind turbines was on land, since it was already developed. But that […]