Weekend Redux: What You Missed

Just because you spent all weekend doing some tax-free shopping, it doesn’t mean the world stopped moving. We round up the notable stories you missed.

Saturday
Hey, remember how Dan Grabauskas said the MBTA is screwed? It can’t be that bad. The T’s GM gave a 9 percent raise to the agency’s executives and managers. Grabauskas says he did it to match the raise union employees recently received under its new contract.

Speaking of the T, workers got an email warning them to be on the lookout for computer attacks after the MIT students’ findings were posted online. There’s no word on whether the T has locked all the open doors the kids found during their research.

Looks like the editors of Wikipedia were right. The FBI and Boston Police used a fingerprint on Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter’s immigration papers to prove he is the man we’ve called Clark Rockefeller. The best part of this discovery was listening to Suffolk County DA Dan Conley and Boston Police Chief Ed Davis say “Gerhartsreiter” during the news conference.

Evangelicals still don’t like Mitt Romney.

If you don’t like camping, stay in a hotel. Don’t do this “glamping” nonsense.

Sunday
We always felt somewhat deficient for making it to our late 20s without buying a house. But after reading that the average assessed value of a Massachusetts home fell while property taxes continue to rise makes us content with renting.

Good job, consumers. You went out in droves to buy your laptops and sofas during the sales tax holiday. Did you see us? We were the ones laughing at the suckers waiting in an epic line at the Apple store to save $9.95 on their iPhone.

Now this is a column.

But [State Senator Dianne Wilkerson] also survives for reasons that say more about the sorry state of politics than about Wilkerson herself. She survives because voters don’t expect that their elected representatives be above their own inadequacies. She survives because her supporters, grateful for the constituent services they should be able to take for granted, don’t expect more.

And for those of you who’ve asked why Sandra Boss married Clark Rockefeller, here’s a scientific explanation.

The art of the con is based on a variation of this idea: that trust is more reflexive than skepticism. And research has suggested that, once people form an initial impression of someone or something, they seem to have a hard time convincing themselves that what they once believed is actually untrue[.]

Hence why we still write letters to Santa Claus.