Source: Market Basket board voted $250M distribution to shareholders

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A Market Basket store in Chelsea, Mass.

Galen Moore

Web Editor-Boston Business Journal

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When Market Basket’s board of directors met on Thursday, workers gathered to show support for what they thought might be a move to oust CEO Arthur T. Demoulas. That didn’t exactly happen, but according to a source familiar with the outcome, the directors voted to authorize a $250 million distribution from the parent company’s coffers.

In addition, the board authorized a move to hire an executive search firm to seek replacements for Arthur T. and other top executives. It’s the latest move in a drawn-out power struggle between the company’s management, controlled by one branch of the Demoulas family, and its board of directors, controlled by the other.

Family-owned Demoulas Super Markets Inc. is unusual among supermarket chain operators for its high profit margins and the fact that it has historically carried no debt.

That may be about to change. According to the source, who asked to remain anonymous because board meetings are confidential, the board on Thursday directed company management to establish a credit facility.

The votes took place after Demoulas’ board shifted the location of its meeting at the last minute, as a crowd of employees planned to post themselves outside Boston’s Harvard Club.

A public relations firm that’s reportedly representing the board of directors could not immediately be reached for comment.

Market Basket has reported $4.01 billion in 2012 revenue and an 8.07 percent EBITDA margin.

The patriarchs of two branches of the Demoulas family are battling for control of the Tewksbury, Mass., company. Cousins Arthur S. Demoulas and Arthur T. Demoulas are among the company’s largest individual shareholders. Arthur S. controls the board, but Arthur T. manages the company. Arthur S.’s branch of the family owns just over half of its stock. But employees have shown their loyalty to Arthur T. in demonstrations outside the past two board meetings, and the company’s management has waged a public relations campaign on his behalf that has brought online petitions and letters from public officials.

The company’s next board meeting is set for Sept. 19.

Coastline of the Faroe Islands.

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The Faroe Islands, a cluster of coastline northwest of Scotland and southeast of Iceland, were widely believed to have been settled by Vikings in the 9th century AD until a recent study discovered burnt peat ash containing barley grains that dated back to somewhere between the 4th and 6th centuries AD. Josephine Lethbridge brought you the full story in Someone beat the Vikings into the North Atlantic by 500 years. The researchers couldn't say with certainty but guessed that the settlers could have been Irish hermits or Picts from the Shetlands.

"As soon as I read that they burned peat and cultivated barley, all I could do is wonder if they had good whisk(e)y," wrote palsyboy.

"Picts, or it didn't happen!" quipped eodell48. But JustAdComics made the most groan-worthy pun of all: "I'm stunned that no one has mentioned the 'obvious' answer: It had to have been the Egyptian Faroes! (Thank you, Thankyouverymuch! I'm here all week! Be sure and tip your waitress!)"  Ugh. Sorry to put you through that again, readers.

During the 2011 Supreme court decision that stuck down a law in California banning the sale of violent video games without parental supervision, justice Samuel Alito researched the topic by playing games himself, The Guardian reports.

Alito's choice in games was not named, though he described the violence as "astounding."

"Victims by the dozens are killed with every imaginable implement, including machine guns, shotguns, clubs, hammers, axes, swords and chainsaws," Alito said. "Victims are dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled, set on fire and chopped into little pieces. They cry out in agony and beg for mercy. Blood gushes, splatters and pools. Severed body parts and gobs of human remains are graphically shown. In some games, points are awarded based, not only on the number of victims killed, but on the killing technique employed."

Alito compared the game's violence to that in literature — a topic that played a significant role in the majority decision

"But only an extraordinary imaginative reader who reads a description of a killing in a literary work will experience that event as vividly as he might if he played the role of the killer in a video game," Alito said. "To take an example, think of a person who reads the passage in Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov kills the old pawn broker with an axe."

According to another justice, Antonin Scalia, Alito recounted the game's graphic nature to "disgust us — but disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression."

You can read the full story over at The Guardian.

weibo.com

QWERTY sliders still exist! Alleged pictures of the "Motorola Droid 5" have surfaced on the Chinese forum weibo.com.

The pictures, which were first spotted by the blog New Cell Phones, show a device similar to the Droids 1-4: a landscape slider with a full 5 row keyboard. New Cell Phones claims the device will have a 4.3 or 4.5 inch display, wireless charging, NFC, and water and dust resistance.

weibo.com/u/1800385445

Motorola's previous landscape QWERTY, the Droid 4, was released almost a year and a half ago, and with the recent Google acquisition, many thought that line of phones was dead. The good news is that this keyboard looks identical to the Droid 4's, which by all accounts was excellent.

It's hard to tell when Parks and Recreation took the title of the most feminism-friendly sitcom on air. When it first aired in 2009, its premise—a new take on the U.S. version of The Office, featuring Amy Poehler in the Michael Scott role—was iffy. The Office's best comedy had always been borderline misanthropic, and the original incarnation of protagonist Leslie Knope took that misanthropy to the edge of misogyny, portraying the character as a terminally obnoxious, deservedly single, incompetent busybody—a woman whose emotional life was largely defined by a pathetic obsession with a years-old hook-up.

But when the first season flopped, the show began to course-correct, jettisoning the sourness and leaning in to the strengths of its wildly talented cast. Parks and Rec is now famous for its warm, humane approach, and the character of Leslie Knope has transformed from a caricature of bureaucratic idiocy into an icon of earnest, dorky, hyper-competent political idealism. This, understandably, has drawn in a huge feminist audience. For female and feminist comedy fans—whose experiences with comics tend to range from blithe marginalization to vicious harassment—the show has come to stand as proof that you can make great comedy without disrespecting, humiliating and/or inflicting cruelty upon women.

If you want to keep thinking that, you'd better stop reading now. The Misogyny in Comedy wars are long, complex and likely to continue for a very long time. But one Parks and Recreation writer has chosen his side by publicly wishing death on anti-racist activists and e-mailing and Tweeting a female writer with the opinion that she is “a cunt.”

The kick-off to all of this is a Defamer article, written by Beejoli Shah, about the career prospects of Parks and Recreation showrunner Greg Daniels. The thrust of the article was that Daniels had left his studio, Universal Television, because he couldn't get any of his new show ideas picked up. As gossip articles go, it was remarkably dry and even-keeled, casting doubt on Daniels (it quotes an anonymous NBC executive saying that the shows “didnt have the usual 'Greg Daniels quality' ”) and on the studio in turn. (NBC executives, in particular, are not known for making the wisest decisions about how to air and nurture new comedies.) But, buried in the midst of all this was an unflattering nugget of info about comic and Parks and Rec writer (and sometimes guest star) Harris Wittels.

Wittels, it seemed, also had a show in development. And according to Shah, the course of comedy had not run smooth: “After a notably atrocious development process with Wittels on this project last fall resulted in a subpar script, UTV is currently having his latest endeavor supervised by an upper level writer with a better track record,” she wrote.

Well. It's reasonable to be offended by having one's working habits described as “notably atrocious.” It's also reasonable to write an e-mail to the publication in question setting the record straight, which Wittels did, claiming that he'd chosen to work with that “upper-level writer” himself, that he was not being supervised, and that he thought the sentence in question comprised “borderline libel.”

But if that last bit sounds a little over-volatile to you, well: buckle your seatbelt. After his e-mail had been sent and published, Wittels proceeded to find Shah on Twitter and bombard her with insults, calling her “sociopathic” and “cunty.” (From his Twitter feed, it would seem that he's since deleted the trolling, but Shah kept and published screen caps.) An anonymous troll used Wittels' harassment as cover for his or her own, sending an e-mail to the Gawker Media offices which claimed that Shah “deserves to die and all the parks writers will gladly fuck the shit out of her dirty lifeless body.” And when Shah herself reached out to Wittels, showing him the rape/death threat, he chose to double down, writing yet another insulting e-mail and signing off with “you're a cunt.” To another Defamer representative, he wrote that “my intention of calling her a cunt was to call her a cunt (because she is you see).”

After an investigation, the Parks and Recreation staff has formally disowned the anonymous troll. But they can't disown Wittels—and his politics are nothing new. In early June, when the stand-up comic community was wrestling with feminist writers (of which I was one) over rape jokes, Wittels Tweeted that “if you think of anything as taboo, you shouldn't be involved in comedy. Go work in a bank.” As regards race, his politics are apparently even less evolved. Of the wildly racist “Asian Girlz” music video and ensuing backlash, Wittels wrote, “For those who campaigned to have that 'Asian Girlz' video removed from YouTube: congrats, you're against free speech and should be shot.”

The fact that a free-speech militant such as Wittels would lapse into misogynist name-calling when faced with even slightly negative speech concerning himself—remember, this all started over the idea that he was being supervised on a project—should not be surprising. The idea of the stand-up comedy stage as an utterly free space, where everything and anything goes, has long gone hand-in-hand with the idea anyone who says anything about the stage should be silenced immediately and by any means necessary. That attitude interlocks, easily and irrevocably, with real-world prejudices about whose voice has the right to be heard, and what they have the right to say. White men, in particular, have always had the right to say pretty much anything they want, about anyone, without being held to account for it. And the spectacle of a white man reacting brutally toward a woman of color because she hasn't been properly affirming toward him has its roots in centuries' worth of history. But any woman who writes publicly is psychically braced to be called a “cunt,” mocked, or harassed from the moment she hits the “publish” or “send” button, because we know that our speech is not “free;” it costs us dearly. Wittels is able to be incensed by a mild condemnation precisely because he doesn't live with the constant harassment that women face every day they publish their work online. Why he's chosen to participate in that harassment, only he can say. But it's probably rooted in that same privilege.

Which brings us back to Parks and Recreation and its status as the Great Network Hope for kindness toward women in comedy. There's no reason to give up on the show; Wittels is one writer, among many, and there's reason to believe his input has been balanced out with kinder and more forward-thinking members of the staff. Wittels' presence in that writing room speaks, most profoundly, to the fact that these hateful behavior patterns are so deep-seated in the industry that even a show famous for its humanity can't help but hire someone who perpetuates them. If the vicious battles over gender and comedy have shown us anything, it's that sexist rage and harassment aren't weird, personally dysfunctional behaviors embraced by a few oddballs within the stand-up comedy community; they are, by and large, the norm. That norm will hopefully change, but until then, there's always the possibility that the shows we love will let us down.

As a feminist, I'll keep watching Parks and Recreation. But I'll always be aware that the words coming out of the characters' mouths could have been written by a man who thinks people like me and my colleagues “should be shot,” and I suppose I'll feel a little chillier toward the show as a result. I'm not giving up hope, though. If the history of Parks and Recreation has shown us anything, it's that this team is more than open to a little necessary course-correction.

By Nathan Grayson on August 26th, 2013 at 3:00 pm.

True fact: I was raised by cats. True fact the second: my first word was “meow.” I’m not joking about that, either. Point is, I very much get the cat mentality. I grew up around them, and I understand the tiny acts of terrorism they are capable of unleashing upon their small domestic worlds. And let’s face it: we, as humans, probably have it coming. I mean, how dare we ever leave the house or not be in a specific spot at an arbitrary time or not clean the litter box every 15 minutes or let the sun go down and ruin their sunbeam or pet them the wrong way or pet them the right way for too long? In these cases, the only answer is swift and frighteningly calculated retribution. Time for Catalateral Damage. Time to break some shit. Poor, oblivious humans. How else will they learn?

Cats are jerks – seemingly for no reason, but mostly for incredibly specific reasons that we can never hope to understand. Catlateral Damage lets us live the cathartic aftermath of such an episode. You, a cat, are stuck in you’re owner’s room. The solution? Daintily paw at objects large and small until you have successfully BROKEN EVERYTHING. Sometimes you might nudge until gravity does the rest, other times a flippant flick of the paw will do the trick in satisfyingly sadistic fashion. You’ve got a two minute time limit. Go!

That’s really all there is to it. Catlateral Damage is about as basic and inconsequential as can be, and that’s exactly what I wanted from it. Be a cat. Do total jerkstore asshole cat things. The end. In this dog-heavy year of games, it’s exactly the dander-and-fur-ridden breath of fresh air we need. It’s also probably the most accurate cat simulation in the history of gaming. What more could you want? Play it now.