Dowbrigade

MILAN— Infamous Boston mobster James ‘Whitey’ Bulger was arrested Wednesday night at the Heavenly Acres trailer park in Milan where he has been hiding for the past three years.
Striking in the middle of the night, FBI agents set up barriers and surrounded the modest trailer. Bulger’s longtime girlfriend, Catherine [...]

In Israel they won’t be passing many dubbies this Passover. The country’s pro-pot Green Leaf Party ("Aleh Yarok") has sent a mass e-mail to its members warning that hemp-related products may be a no-no for those who keep Kosher during Pesach. According the party’s spokeswoman, "we are considering announcing a ban on everything containing hemp [...]

A Chinese woman escaped jail after she cut off her husband’s penis and threw it out of the window.
The man drove himself to hospital – but doctors couldn’t reattach the organ as it had been eaten by a dog, reports Jinling Evening Post.
Yao Fengfang was given a three year suspended jail sentence after her husband, [...]

As previously reported, the Dowbrigade spent the past weekend at BarCamp Boston 2, the "unconference" for tech types this time held at MIT’s Stata Center. The GQ (Geek Quotient) was off the chart, and we stood little chance of understanding most of the presentations or even the hallway chatter.
However, we have never let ignorance [...]

While perusing the Sunday paper, an odd scrap often catches in the old cranial craw, requiring rumination and later regurgitation. Case in point, from that paragon of American journalism, Parade Magazine:
Nancy Cassidy, from Falls Church, VA, asks Ms. Smartypants, aka Marilyn von Savant, the Smartest Woman in the World, as certified by the Guinness Book [...]

We’ve been hearing this crap for far too long. American education is going to the dogs. Test scores are down across the board, in Reading and Writing and Rithmatic. On a list of Average National Test Scores the US is stuck somewhere between Liberia and Lesotho.
As an educator, parent and keen observer of youth culture, [...]

A German belly dancer has been awarded

LONDON — If you think "wiki" doesn’t sound like English, you are right. But it’s English now.
This word born on the Pacific Island of Hawaii finally got an entry into the latest edition of the online Oxford English Dictionary along with 287 other new words.
It has earned it.
"Words are included in the dictionary on the [...]

Music maven and Berkman blogger Sooz made the Globe yesterday, on the front page of the Business section. While this was not where we expected to find Sooz in the paper (Local? National? Arts? Sidekick?) it introduced us to a previously unglimpsed side of her personality.
Sooz, it seems, has her own internet radio station [...]

Local action in Boston concerning the Homeland Security Gestapo-style raid on the defense-contractor leather factory in New Bedford seems to be percolating up from the grass-roots level. The Dowbrigade position on immigration is that people ought to be able to live and work wherever they want and can find a job.
Folks should be able [...]

RALEIGH, N.C. — When John Cornwell graduated from Duke University last year, he landed a job as software engineer in Atlanta but soon found himself longing for his college lifestyle.
So the engineering graduate built himself a contraption to help remind him of campus life: a refrigerator that can toss [...]

Captain America, a Marvel Entertainment superhero, is fatally shot by a sniper in the 25th issue of his eponymous comic, which arrived in stores yesterday. The assassination ends the sentinel of liberty’s fight for right, which began in 1941.
The last episode in Captain America’s life comes after the events of “Civil War,” a seven-issue mini-series [...]