Bad Transit makes the argument against the T's proposed South End/South Boston tunnel.

Beso reports he and his Hanover Street neighbors are still getting their power from diesel generators, several days after all those manholes exploded:

... At night, everyone's house is filled w/ the stink of diesel fuel from those things. Horrible.

Ron took a walk down Hanover Street today and says it's still a mess:

... Not only is it full of NStar trucks and heavy equipment, but they're jackhammering in front of Caffe dello Sport. That can't be much fun for the people trying to drink coffee or watch soccer games inside. ...

The Globe today has an op-ed piece by some guy complaining about a teacher-union boycott of Wal-Mart. He's described as "director of the Labor Policy Center for the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a nonpartisan, public policy research organization based in Olympia, Wash."

Dan spends five minutes with Google and discovers that the foundation is, in fact, heavily funded by conservative groups, the sort that just don't like unions - and got $300,000 between 1998 and 2000 from a foundation set up by the late founder of Wal-Mart. Nothing wrong with letting them speak, but the Globe does a disservice by not letting readers know where the author is coming from, he writes:

... Needless to say, full disclosure should have been provided. But I suspect that the Globe editors would rather have killed the piece than admit it was funded with money from the likes of Wal-Mart and Scaife.

Sarah comes back to Boston from California for a visit:

... I got off the T at a station I'd never been to before, Stonybrook, and felt a huge wash of happiness as soon as I saw the three-story Victorians quietly absorbing summer rain under a row of tossing green trees. Those houses really do a number on me in a kind of primordial way. They say "home," and "why don't you rearrange your life right now so that you can live in one of us, because what else could be more important?" My friend Emily G lives in a wonderful apartment in one of those houses, in what seems to be a really great neighborhood in Jamaica Plain called Hyde Square (because every place in Boston is a square). It's funny that it's so familiar even though I've never been here before. ...