Two things about this youtube clip. One is that Charlie Brooker is brilliantly profane. If you have no admiration for the Brit sense of sarcasm, you might want to skip this. The second, is after laughing myself silly, I immediately thought, these are the twits that think Barack Obama should be president. 

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One of the more sublime things about the Internet these days is that someone, somewhere has put up a web site devoted to the very thing you thought of this morning. And so it was one of my midnight surfs that led me to this lovely site, devoted to turning each and every American into a webified Gladys Kravitz. The part I especially love is the ironic use of monopoly houses to pin point the entries on the map. Clever.So check it out, not much going on in Norwalk on the site, but I’m sure that will change.www.rottenneighbor.com

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Not so very long ago I was sitting across from Jack Goldman, then tech advisor to some obscure VC firm attempting to latch on to a pre dot-com bust tech company, and I was the pitching the unified theory of how $20 million would one day turn into a $1 billion windfall. The suits were questioning the company founders on why this particular tech enterprise was located in Danbury, and whether it was a good location. (It was not, but that’s a long techie digression.) I don’t think anyone else from our side caught the implications of the question, and I would have missed it were it not for the coincidence that I was reading one of the best books I ever read about the decision to locate the Xerox technology research center in Palo Alto, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age.

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Isn’t this sort of a dog bites man story?

Sen. Bob Duff, D-25, majority whip, and Rep. Toni Boucher, R-143, who both serve the legislature’s transportation committee, said they had no idea the rail facility would cost more than the $300 million appropriation from 2005.

Jeff Beckham, a spokesman for the state Office of Policy Management, said the office was made aware of higher costs, but he wasn’t able to determine as of press time who found out and when.

“We understand that we’re going to have to fund that in the future, and we’ve been working with DOT to identify those funding needs,” he said.

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Just when you think political stereotypes are out dated, the Common Council Dems decided that keeping an eye on property taxes was too hard and they voted down a proposal to cap the Norwalk budget at 4.1%, or the rate of inflation.

“(The cap) was a number that the leadership of the council came up with,” said Carvin J. Hilliard, Finance Committee chairman, afterward.

The committee recommended the cap on a 4-2 vote along party lines, according to Hilliard, a Democrat.

Republican Douglas E. Hempstead tried unsuccessfully to set the cap lower by lowering the net increase to the Board of Education from 4.5 percent to 4.1 percent.

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The finance committee of the common council debated, sort of, whether to reimburse Nick Kydes for the lawyer that he hired to defend himself against then fellow council member Kevin Poruban’s ethics complaint. As an appointed official myself, I have to agree with the conclusion of corporate counsel on the indemnification of elected and appointed officials. 

“My information, again it’s from almost anecdotally, but it’s from people who told me things about past practice,” Maslan said. “My understanding has been when an official, like a council person, was the subject of a complaint, and the activity, or the conduct, or the action that is the focus of the complaint was the person actually acting in the capacity as council person, then the provision of the defense was automatic.”

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Having someone dedicated to promoting Norwalk as a film location makes good sense. Having film crews come in does benefit the economy, and certainly adds a little excitement to the everyday war on potholes. Maybe even the great minds of government can suddenly realize that having old buildings that film makers want to take pictures of might be a good thing, Stephen King meet 93 East ave.

When it comes to filming a major motion picture, a lot of decidedly unglamorous steps come before “Lights, camera, action!”

One of those steps is applying for a film permit - a process that can take weeks in Norwalk.

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This is part of an ongoing series of guest posts about issues in Norwalk. yourCT.com is a non-partisan site dedicated to airing all sides of a issue. That can’t happen without valuable contributions from our readers.

by Fred Wilms

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Nice to see the low level dealers being targeted but where’s the linkage to the guys who import?

The U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut, Kevin J. O’Connor, announced Wednesday that 22 people — 16 from Norwalk and Stamford — have been indicted on federal charges for allegedly distributing cocaine and crack in southwestern Connecticut.
In a news release, O’Connor said the 30-count indictment was returned on Feb. 14 by a federal grand jury sitting in Bridgeport, and accuses the people named with various federal drug trafficking, firearm and witness tampering offenses.

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The spinmeister-meister spinners are off this week so slipping through the fortress of ineptitude is the latest report card on Norwalk public schools.

An independent study released Wednesday ranked Norwalk schools scraping the bottom in working to close their achievement gaps with black and Hispanic students.
Norwalk high schools are ranked 99 out of 119 state school districts. Elementary and middle schools are ranked 68 out of 153 and 117 out of 144 respectively.
Scraping the bottom! Ranked 99 out of 199 school districts! Uh yeah, some perception problem here.

The study looked at how a public school is meeting students’ academic needs through test scores. It also analyzed the “traditionally underserved” black, low-income and Hispanic subgroups to understand where the achievement gap lies.

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