Weekend Redux: What You Missed

Just because you spent all weekend feeling jet-lagged by the time change doesn’t mean the world stopped moving. We round up the notable stories you missed.

Saturday
Oh Samantha Power. Before she resigned from Barack Obama’s campaign for her comments about Hillary Clinton’s monstrosity, she was digging the candidate into a hole about his Iraq policy.

“You can’t make a commitment in March of 2008 about what circumstances are going to be like in January 2009,” said Power. . . . “He will, of course, not rely upon some plan that he has crafted as a presidential candidate or a US senator. He will rely upon an operational plan that he pulls together in consultation with people on the ground.”

Obama insists he will stick to his pledge to bring the troops home.

One public servant is acting on his words. Turnpike Chairman Alan LeBovidge fired four high-ranking Turnpike Authority employees to reduce waste.

Speaking of waste, Mayor Tom Menino has big plans for Storrow Drive.

In a speech about ways to preserve the character of the city’s neighborhoods while encouraging billions of dollars in development, the mayor said the state should build a 100-foot-wide greenway over part of Storrow Drive.

“Think about this for a minute,” he said, speaking to business leaders at a South Boston hotel. “We can reopen the riverfront to residents, connect the Charles River and the Public Garden, and create more green space in the heart of our downtown neighborhoods.”

Don’t we already have a ton of new open space? It’s called the Rose Kennedy Greenway. And we can get to the riverfront by using one of the crumbling footbridges that already exist. At the same meeting, Menino also said he’s still planning to move City Hall to the Waterfront. Sigh.

Going against the rest of Major League Baseball, the Red Sox have signed an agreement for Ace Ticket to the the team’s official “offline” ticket reselling agency. League rules require the team use StubHub for online ticket resale, but the Sox haven’t signed a deal with the company yet. So you’re stuck using Ace until the team decides what to do.

Also, MIT students should be pretty happy when their tuition bills come in next year.

The new policy, approved by the MIT board of trustees, waives tuition and replaces loans with grants to cover expenses outside tuition for students whose families earn less than $75,000 a year.

We like this new trend of middle-income students getting a free education. Now if these esteemed institutions could make the policy retroactive, we’d be all set.

Sunday
We’d like to say hello to all the mayoral bloggers out there. Though we are sad that Mayor Menino doesn’t have a blog (or a computer, apparently), we’re happy to see Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone has his own band of crazy commenters. (We’re looking at you, American Idol fans.)

“You put yourself out there in real time, and you get responses in real time. And it may not always be the response you want. You may talk about how great it was to work at the Special Olympics, and then they say, ‘That’s great, Mr. Mayor, but what about my pothole?'”

For serious, Joe. Our bus nearly got swallowed up by a pothole on the McGrath Highway last week.

Mayor Curtatone’s blog must not be really popular yet. Somerville cult hero and snow-emergency announcer Tom Champion doesn’t know the mayor is down with the internets.

The mayor, for his part, seems unaware of his spokesman’s newfound fame and said he didn’t know about the Facebook page or the haiku. By way of explanation, Champion offered that “the Web is not [Curtatone’s] realm.”

If you’re going to be a blogger, you’ve got to be down with social networking.

The cost of food is going up. It’s cool, though. We’ll just eat more pasta.

Wholesale food prices, an indicator of where supermarket prices are headed, rose last month at the fastest rate since 2003, with egg prices jumping 60 percent from a year ago, pasta products 30 percent, and fruits and vegetables 20 percent, according to the Labor Department.

Damn.

During the 2000 elections, the hot topic was which candidate we’d like to have a beer with. We’d like to state for the record that we’d like to have a beer with John McCain, largely because his ties to the beer industry means he could probably get our drinks for free.

Were you really good at Hide and Seek as a kid? If so, the State Police could use you on its Fugitive Squad, which finds suspects curled up in dryers, in closets, and even jammed into a fold-out couch.

Josh Beckett might be unavailable to pitch on opening day due to back spasms. Wonderful.