I’m driving in the slow zone this holiday week, but I do want to share a couple of stories and some information on how you can make Elon Musk unhappy as we count down the days until 2025.
First up: Marc Ramirez has written a fascinating story in USA Today about Michelle Johnson’s journey to learn more about her Black ancestors in the South. A lot of us in Boston media know Johnson as a retired journalism professor at Boston University and, before that, as a top editor at Boston.com during its early days in the mid-1990s.
Johnson and her spouse, Myrna Greenfield, traveled to the Carolinas earlier this year to research family members who had been slaves and who had continued to live in the South after the Civil War. At one point, she visited a home in North Carolina, where they were invited in by the white couple who lived there and shown the still-standing slave quarters out back. Johnson recalled:
They had taken the slave cabin and pieced it together with this old kitchen and use it as a guesthouse now. There was a ladder leaning up against it and they told us the enslaved persons working there would have used it to up to the second level. … I wondered if any of my relatives would have been there. Would they have worked in that kitchen? To be in that space where some of them might have been was really moving.
Having learned about her mother’s side of the family, Johnson told Ramirez that she is now hoping to delve into her father’s side.
Oh, deer
This past Saturday we were driving along the Mystic Lakes in Medford shortly before 10 p.m. when two deer suddenly bounded in front of us. My wife, Barbara, who was driving, swerved and missed the first but then hit the second. It crumpled by the side of the road; we drove off, then returned a few minutes later to see that it had evidently gotten up and bounded into the surrounding woods. We hope it wasn’t badly hurt.
It turns out that the deer population in Massachusetts is exploding. Scooty Nickerson reports for The Boston Globe that Massachusetts is home to about 160,000 deer, double the population in the 1990s.
As a result, more and more deer are running afoul of motor vehicles. Westport leads the state with 337 reported collisions between 2018 and 2022; Middleborough, where I grew up, was second, with 272.
Overpopulation is spreading disease and contribution to erosion, as the animals eat plants along shorelines. Sadly, one solution is more hunting, which is unpopular in Massachusetts, especially in the urban and suburban communities inside Route 495.
Avoiding collisions is a challenge. Deer can dart out in front of cars during daylight hours and in settled areas, as you can see from the police photo that accompanies the Globe story. But you might be able to improve your odds by driving slowly and staying alert if you find yourself driving through a wooded area after dark.
Make Elon cry
Elon Musk hates Wikipedia, because of course he does. The serial entrepreneur, destroyer of Twitter and now Donald Trump’s wingman went off on one of his periodic benders a few days ago, denouncing it as “Wokepedia,” questioning its finances and offering to donate $1 billion if it would change its name to “Dickipedia.” Gosh, what a brilliant sense of humor.
Wikipedia may be the last uncorrupted place on the internet, driven solely by its mission to make the world’s knowledge available to everyone. It’s not perfect, but the folks who run it do a much better job of keeping out trolls and vandals than was the case in the early days more than 20 years ago. Better understood as a research tool than a reference source, it is the ideal starting place for all kinds of projects — especially through the linked footnotes and external websites that are listed at the bottom of every article.
I’ve given in the past and decided to dig a little deeper following Musk’s outburst. I hope you will, too.
