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Cambridge: A city cowering in fear

Brit tabloid the Daily Mail breathlessly reports about rogue turkeys in Cambridge, yes, Cambridge, not Brookline:

Aggressive wild TURKEYS are terrorizing upmarket Boston suburb by taking over roads and attacking frightened children ...

Neighborhood parents and residents have learned how to navigate the streets with caution as they build their commutes around the feathered fiends

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Comments

Can we please kill the use of "upscale" for expensive restaurants and zip codes?

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Most of the text and all the images are all from the Channel 25 report. They did include the video, but didn't even credit Channel 25, referring to it as a "local news outlet"

Here is the original report
https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/cambridge-residents-concerned-af...

In other news, in my neighborhood in Dorchester, we have larger turkey gangs and they're more aggressive. And they leave their feces everywhere.

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I wish I could attach a photo here, but trust me when I tell you that I had 27 turkeys on my lawn in Newton a couple of weeks ago. They're menacing and fearless and I was afraid to try to walk by them to get to my car.

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Take 'em out from a second storey window. Problem solved.

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Love that, I mean Cambridge is not Boston but 117,000 people is hardly a suburb.

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Plano Texas just a bit north of the City of Dallas Texas
Certainly, it is not Dallas [Wikipedia]:

Area
• City 385.9 sq mi (999.2 km2)
• Land 339.604 sq mi (879.56 km2)
• Water 43.87 sq mi (113.60 km2)

Population (2020)
• City 1,304,379

but Plano is considered a suburb of Dallas with its 2020 Census Population: 285,494

Irving is smaller than Plano with
City 256,684 [Wikipedia]

Garland is probably smaller than Plano
Estimate (2019) 239,928 [Wikipedia]

Richardson Texas while quite a bit smaller than Plano is [according to Wikipedia]

a city in Dallas and Collin counties in the U.S. state of Texas.
As of the 2020 United States census, the city had a total population of 119,469.
Richardson is an inner suburb of the city of Dallas.

Home to:

  • the University of Texas at Dallas
  • the Telecom Corridor, with a high concentration of telecommunications companies.
  • More than 5,000 businesses have operations within Richardson's 28 square miles (73 km2), including many of the world's largest telecommunications and networking companies, such as AT&T, Verizon, Cisco Systems, Samsung, ZTE, MetroPCS, Texas Instruments, Qorvo, and Fujitsu.
  • Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas's headquarters,
  • a regional hub for the insurance company GEICO,
  • regional offices for United Healthcare,
  • and one of State Farm Insurance's three national regional hubs located in the community.

All of those are considered suburbs of "Big D" and all are considerably bigger than Cambridge in population and much bigger in area

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You just know they place these kinds of stories just to embolden TLF, driving the wedge further and fomenting inter-species warfare. If TLF didn't get any coverage they would fade away and we could focus on the real scourge, squirrels! They always stealing food from the bird feeder and trying to get into your attic.

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Haven't heard from the TLF in some time. I think they have formed a partnership with the CHUDs and are just waiting for their moment to burst back onto the scene.

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The Turkey Liberation Front is just waiting for the Coyote Liberation Organization to have commandeered more naval assets so they can complete a two prong attack takeover of Cambridge.

Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers are more than happy in their sewers. No one is trying to get rid of them. Heck, most people don't even believe in them.

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They are all spy robots.

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That's the first time I've ever seen Cambridge described as an upmarket Boston suburb. It's definitely an urb not a suburb, and while some parts are "upmarket" many are not.

The real question is whether these turkeys are town or gown.

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"In the upscale Boston neighborhood of Cambridge"

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Municipal boundaries are pretty arbitrary, and if the inaccurate distinction is suburb vs neighborhood of Boston, the latter, in my opinion, is less far off the mark. By British standards, Cambridge would certainly be considered a neighborhood of Boston.

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New Jersey is a neighborhood of New York. Those ex-colonials are all a bit silly, with their arbitrary boundaries.

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Half of NJ is a neighborhood of Philly.

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Then British standards are factually incorrect.

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INCREDIBLE

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It's the Daily Fail; if they told me the sun rose in the east this morning I'd probably check for myself.

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Coincidentally (or not?) the Cambridge city website just added a page about turkeys.
https://www.cambridgema.gov/news/2023/03/wildturkeys

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"Tabloid" would be one way to put it. "British print equivalent of Fox News" would be another, more accurate way.

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A more abt comparison is to London's Daily Mail is the NYC's Daily News
both are tabloids ready by "straphangers" on the transit systems -- hence their format something which you can hold in one hand and fold as needed to read the headlines and see the pictures

In Boston there used to be a tabloid designed for the T [or its predecessors] known as the Record American --in the day of several Boston papers located downtown

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giving birth, after a time, to today's Boston Herald (also a tabloid).

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At one time [circa late 19th C until perhaps 75 years ago] there were many papers -- each with its own editorial viewpoint agreeing with the buyers/readers' lifestyle, major advertisers [mostly the big 7 or so Department Stores] and mostly located on/near Newspaper Row at the edge of the Financial District. The papers active [at one time] over the past 100+ years include [the with the common "Boston" omitted]:

  • The Herald
  • The Traveler
  • The Journal
  • The Daily Record
  • The Evening American
  • The Daily Advertiser
  • The Globe
  • The Evening Transcript
  • The Journal
  • The Post
  • The Investigator

from the Wikipedia article on Newspaper Row

In its first incarnation, Newspaper Row was located between State and Water Streets, in the financial district. But gradually, as the city expanded and more department stores and other businesses opened in the vicinity of Washington Street, the major newspapers moved closer to the center of commerce. By the early 1900s, according to the Boston City Directory, the Boston Globe was at 244 Washington Street, the Boston Evening Transcript was at 324 Washington (at Milk Street), the Boston Post was at 261 Washington Street, the Boston Journal was at 264 Washington Street, the Boston American was at 80-82 Summer Street, and the Associated Press was at 293 Washington Street. Other Boston news services, including the Boston Herald and Boston Traveler, were not far from Newspaper Row.

Note -- with the advent of Radio 30's and then Television 50's most lost their lock on advertisers and then folded -- some merged -- i.e. [Herald with the Traveler and the Record with the American]. A second burst of failures and consolidations happened as the new technology dominated economy grew rapidly first Rt-128 and then later out Rt-2 [the Computer Commuter], I-495 and then I-93 toward and into NH [Raytheon]:

  1. Boston population dropped,
  2. the Downtown emptied out
  3. the big Department Stores closed
  4. the old Boston city was being demolished to make room for "Urban Renewal"
  5. Newspapers disappeared or consolidated [e.g. Boston Herald American from the Record-American and the Herald] and moved away from "Newspaper Row" [In 1958, the Globe opened its Morrissey Boulevard Hq complex with both printing and editorial offices]

All that was left in the Boston newspaper world [circa 1990] was:

  1. the "venerable Globe" [although no-longer locally owned -- NY Times purchased it in 1993]
  2. and the Herald [the result of final act of consolidation of the Record American with the Herald Traveler]. There were numerous changes of ownership of the paper and its associated Radio and TV stations [WHDH] -- a powerful innovative media combine undermined by local politics leading to a chain of events:
    1. Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy included language in an appropriations bill barring one company from owning a newspaper and television station in the same market which effectively "canceled" the new Herald and its TV station
    2. giving birth ironically to the Hearst Media's Channel 5 TV WCVB as Hearst had once owned the Record.
    3. Later on remnants of the once powerful Herald -- near to financial collapse -- suffered the ignominy of forced sale and later bankruptcy auction.
    4. Today the vestigial remnants of the venerable Herald [dating to downtown Boston before the Civil War] is now edited in a Braintree office park and printed by a contractor -- somewhere??
    5. Herald today is owned by Alden Global Capital operating as Digital First Media (DFM) formerly known as MediaNews Group which now also owns [as of 2022] Tribune Publishing [collectively the second-largest newspaper publisher by daily print circulation in the United States].

By the "Cable" / www era [circa 2000 - 2010] --- Even the survivor newspapers had abandoned the downtown for "terra incognito" [i.e. Morrisey Blvd, Seaport District] -- not just for their printing plants [Globe moved printing to Taunton from Morrisey Blvd. and the Herald was being printed by the Globe] but for their editorial offices [Herald in the Seaport District]. Meanwhile Local TV Stations -- mostly located in the suburbs -- became the newspapers' replacement controlling all of the advertising market. Strange weekly advertising circulars took over most of the revenue of the print distribution.

Now, circa 2020 -- the TV dominated news economy is once again in rapid change mode with much of the advertising now delivered by social media. Also rapidly changing are the demographics of news/advertiser consumers and the real-estate associated with the media [the Globe editorial offices are back to downtown -- on State St. -- almost where Newspaper Row began -0- but the Globe's printing plant is gone completely from Massachusetts to Rhode Island and Morrisey Blvd., is being redeveloped into Biotech] while the Herald's long-time post-"Newspaper Row" home on Herald St is becoming mostly luxury condos.

Come back in 2030 -- as today no one can confidently predict what the final outcome will look like.

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Oh right. I haven't thought of the Daily News in years and I can't say I feel my life is the poorer for that.

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