Thing slow down around the end of the year for us in the news biz, which is why we often eat up space with otherwise pointless year-end Best Of/Worst Of columns.

Let the pointlessness begin!

BEST PART OF MY JOB: Election years. Sure, some of these politicians drive me crazy, others make me wonder why the hell they’re even bothering, but it’s always fun to pick the brains of our elected (and hope-to-be-elected) officials to see what makes ‘em tick…then turn around and poke them in my column and in this blog. That’s what you get for opening up to me, suckahs!

WORST PART OF MY JOB: Covering meetings. Not all meetings, mind you, but some are exercises in torture. I speak specifically of meetings that should by all rights wrap up in relatively short order but manage to go on and on and dear sweet baby Jesus on. The usual culprits are people who can’t stay on-topic (wind farm hearings); agendas stacked with overly long and often unnecessary presentations (Mashpee School Committee); committee members who feel they HAVE to say something just to remind everyone they’re there, even if what they say is little more than “Howard Johnson is right!” (Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates); and gadflies who absolutely must speak up and share their vast knowledge of a subject, even if what they’re saying is a repeat of something that has already been said, most likely by them at a previous meeting (again, wind farm hearings).

BEST MOVIE (IN THEATERS): “The Dark Knight.” Intelligent, exciting, moving, thoroughly engrossing from start to finish, and I would call Heath Ledger’s Joker the most terrifying version of that character ever, even had he lived to receive the accolade.

WORST MOVIE (IN THEATERS): I didn’t see anything truly terrible this year, but there were a lot of disappointments: “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” was among them, but the real letdowns were “Doomsday” and “Run Fatboy Run.” The former is a post-apocalyptic actioneer by Neil Marshall, who gave us the wonderfully wacky “Dog Soldiers” and the nailbiter “Descent.” The movie showed some signs of personality near the end, but it was too little too late. And “Run Fatboy Run” had Simon Pegg stuck in a generic RomCom even he could not elevate with his considerable comedic talent.

BEST MOVIE (ON VIDEO): “The Mist.” If you’ve not seen this, try and get your hands on the black and white version (it’s on disc two on the two-disc set). Then try not to be totally creeped out. The movie, based on a Stephen King novella, does its greatest damage with a jaw-dropper of an ending. You might see it coming, but you’ll still be floored. Plus, I’ve had many a spirited conversation about what was going on in the movie at deeper levels, something few horror flicks can claim.

WORST MOVIE (ON VIDEO): Now, I watch a lot of movies on DVD, cable, and through Netflix, and I have a soft spot for bad sci-fi and horror films, but every so often I come across a movie that is unwatchable even by my standards. That honor is shared by two movies. The first is “The Tomb,” which is pitched as an H.P. Lovecraft-inspired deal but comes across as a bunch of college students trying to make their own version of “Saw” in someone’s basement. I had to force myself to watch it through to the end. Thank god it was free on FearNet.com.

Second is “Bloodsucking Freaks,” and I’m not going to link to it lest you foolishly follow the link. This is a cult-classic low-budget horror/exploitation flick that just leaves you feeling icky and wrong on so many levels. I’m pretty sure the guy who wrote and directed this just hated women. Don’t give in to curiosity like I did.

BEST BOOK: Wow, tough one. I’ll recommend three: Lamb - The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore; The Ruins by Scott Smith; and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Lamb is a humorous, intelligent, thoughtful, and irreverent (but not disrespectful) tale of Christ’s “lost years” as told by his buddy Biff. Through the story readers will learn how Christ came up with his greatest sermons and homilies, and why Jews eat Chinese food on Christmas. The Ruins is a dark horror story chronicling a misadventure to a South American archaeological dig. If you can suspend disbelief sufficiently, it’s a gripping read. And what hasn’t already been said a million times about Treasure Island? It’s a classic for a reason. Sure, a lot of it seems very cliche now, but you know what? This is the book that created those cliches.

WORST BOOK: I did not read anything I feel compelled to warn people away from. I guess I can only say my worst book of 2008 was the ones I didn’t get to read because I didn’t have enough time.

BEST TV SHOW: I judge “Lost” and “24” on a season-by-season basis, but right now the most consistently enjoyable show on the tube right now is “Chuck” on NBC. It’s exciting, unfailingly funny, and the characters are all completely lovable in their own ways. Adam Baldwin as Agent John Casey is the real comic genius here, delivering his every line with a growling deadpan that never fails to amuse.

WORST TV SHOW: “Heroes.” The show had such promise once, but it petered out at the end of season one and never regained its footing (and the writers’ strike can only accept so much of the blame). Season three has been a morass of convoluted plotlines, not-at-all-surprising revelations, inconsistent characterization, and a total lack of tension…unlike “Lost,” where no character is safe, “Heroes” is deathly afraid to off anyone the audience likes, so the stakes are non-existent.

BEST THING ON THE RADIO: “Little Steven’s Underground Garage.” Little Steven Van Zandt hosts this weekly foray into the broadly-defined pseudo-genre of garage rock, peppering only a handful of familiar tunes in amongst deep tracks from well-known groups and undiscovered gems from bands you’ve never heard of before. Catch it Sunday mornings on WHJY-FM or on-line.

WORST THING ON THE RADIO: Just about every morning radio show on any given rock stations. Are DJs really incapable of anything better than a non-stop barrage of self-indulgent pseudo-humor centered around crude bodily functions, lame parody songs, even lamer celebrity impressions, and witless prank calls? Crass humor can be done well, but when it’s done poorly — and incessantly — it becomes an ordeal. Everyone is trying way too hard to become the next Howard Stern and failing miserably. Shut up and play some music.

BEST PIZZA: Paul’s in Falmouth. Even a simple cheese pizza is bliss. I can (and often do) devour a whole pizza without blinking.

BEST SEAFOOD: The Clam Shack on Falmouth Harbor. I’ve not missed an opening day in nearly 40 years (wow, feelin’ old here), and they have the best fried clams EVER. Chase ‘em down with an order of onion rings.

BEST CHINESE: Peking Palace. The C-7 luncheon special is total comfort food…I break out into a big dumb grin just walking out of the restaurant with the take-out bag.

BEST MEXICAN: Sam Diego’s. Whatever you get, make sure there are ribs somewhere on the plate, and always finish with the flan.

BEST BEER: Anything with the “Samuel Adams” label on it, though I am partial to the Boston Ale, which few restaurants sell on tap. Luckily you can get the Boston Lager easily ’round these parts.

WORST BEER: I reckon Budweiser, Michelob, Miller,  Coors, Busch, etc., all still taste like floor cleaner. I couldn’t say for sure, I’ve not insulted my taste buds with such mass-produced domestic swill in many years.

BEST COFFEE: Starbucks. Sorry, Dunkin’ Donuts, I like my coffee to have, y’know, flavor.

WORST COFFEE: The watery crap that just about every public function I attended in 2008 served. I don’t know why I bother drinking it.

WORST BURGERS: McDonald’s. And yet, every so often I have a craving for one. I know it’ll sit in my stomach like a hot, angry rock, but I’m powerless to resist.

WORST MOST ANNOYING COMMERCIAL: McDonald’s series of ads pimping their specialty coffee drinks. In these ads, pretentious dolts who exist only in fictional coffee shops have a grand revelation when they hear McDonald’s is making lattes and other fancy-dang coffee drinks. They immediately abandon the clothing and behavior they adopted to fit in at the cafe and revel in their freedom to once again indulge in simply everyman pleasures like professional sports, reality shows, and gossip tabloids. Oh, yes, that’s so much better than reading novels and newspapers and engaging in intellectual discussions. So, if I’m following all this correctly: McDonald’s is making fun of the very market they’re trying to horn in, mocking “elitism” (the BS buzzword of the year) by extolling the virtues of lowbrow crap culture, and exhorting people to be a sheep for the Golden Arches instead of a sheep for Starbucks and their ilk. Got it.

I get a lot of news tips here at my job. Sometimes they’re presented to me out of noble, or at least innocuous intentions — a legitimately curious inquiry from a reader, for example, or a concern something is not quite kosher.

Other times, there’s a clear and selfish agenda behind hot tips; the person feeding me information is hoping to reap some sort of benefit, even if it comes in the form of schadenfreude over someone else’s embarrassment or downfall.

I think I covered the spread nicely last week when I received a number of e-mails from folks pointing out the minor controversy surrounding Tim Madden, the newly elected state rep of the Barnstable, Dukes, Nantucket district. Some of the e-mails had a distinctly “Hey, did you hear about this?” tone, whereas others might as well have ended with, “At long last, Mr. Madden, have you no decency?!”

Long story short: Madden paid John Stanton, husband of Nantucket Inquirer & Mirror publisher and editor Marianne Stanton, for consultation services — specifically, advice on how to deal with reporter-types such as myself.

You might think, “Okay, what’s so sketchy about that?” Well, the sketchy part, according to some, is the I&M’s endorsement of Madden’s candidacy, which was given sans disclosure of Madden’s working relationship with Mr. Stanton (who also occasionally writes for the paper).

(Side note: the story was broken by the I&M’s rival publication, the Nantucket Independent…which, notably, also endorsed Madden…in August, when he was only a write-in candidate, in a piece provocatively titled, How to Vote Early and Often, an unabashed call to arms for Nantucket voters to get the hometown hopeful in the seat.)

Illegal? No. Dicey? Marginally. Kinda boneheaded? Well, yeah.

Madden said he asked John Stanton if it would cause problems working for him, and Stanton said it wouldn’t because his wife was officially recusing herself from all discussions pertaining to Madden and his candidacy. They thought that would be enough, but it obviously wasn’t, based on how irate some people were when the news broke.

I’ve yet to hear of a real, solid accusation against either Madden or the I&M — even from the Independent, which could have had a field day with this story — but the implication seems to be that they were somehow in cahoots.

My question to everyone who might themselves think this: yes, and?

Let me reveal one of the worst kept secrets in journalism: politicians show favoritism toward certain media outlets and vice-versa. It happens all the time. Politician X will go out of his way to talk to Reporter Y personally and maybe grace Reporter Z with a one-page press release, because Reporter X has treated them well in the past. In return, Newspaper X will defend Politician Y in most cases, while Newspaper Z dances a merry fandango on Politician Y’s reputation.

I myself have a laundry list of people, politicians and otherwise, who will call me before they call another paper (if they call my competition at all), and I have people and organizations for who I will put in a little extra effort, because we’ve built up a good working relationship. I hasten to add that this does not mean that when these people legitimately screw up I’m going to cut them slack…it means that even if I give them a solid grilling but do so fairly, they’ll continue to return my phone calls.

So what if Madden is chummy with the guys and gals at the I&M? The implication that Madden parlayed this relationship into an endorsement, even if true, is a negligible issue. First consider that he received endorsements from EVERY newspaper in his district, including the Enterprise; had the other papers gone another way, backed another canddiate, his I&M plug would have seemed extremely suspect, but that paper was not a lone voice in the wilderness.

Not that endorsements are such a crucial element of a successful campaign. Just ask Madden’s rival Dan Larkosh, who had a ton of endorsements from a lot of high-profile groups and individuals, including Governor Deval Patrick, yet still came in second. Any voter with a lick of sense — I’ll give you a moment to exercise your cynicism and scoff haughtily — is not going to hinge his decision on who his local newspaper tells him to vote for.

Then consider that key question: who had what to gain from whom from any kind of shady deal? Madden may have felt he had something big to gain — the race — but what about afterwards? Perhaps he expects to be treated with kid gloves and be the subject of several glowing puff pieces, but let’s be honest: if someone discovered dead Cub Scouts in his basement tomorrow, do you think for a minute the I&M would just bury the story, or worse, try and make excuses on his behalf? Our reporter spoke to a man who knew several of the Scouts and described them as “a band of vicious thugs who would throw their own mothers under a speeding bus for the change in their purses.” This paper would like to thank Tim Madden for pro-actively saving these poor, defenseless women from their own sociopathic progeny.

Not happening, people.

The I&M has much more to gain from any kind of quid pro quo arrangement, and consequently they come off looking worse than Madden. Regardless of the steps they took, and regardless of their true intent, the paper placed its reputation in jeopardy by failing to fully disclose the Madden-Stanton connection.

Note that I said “regardless of their true intent.” Ahh, what was their intent? Was there any intent at all? All anyone can do, and all anyone has done, is speculate on those points; I have yet to see anything constituting hard evidence of shenanigans. And, since everyone involved is saying, “We thought we were good, but I guess we weren’t so, whoops, our bad,” who among us has the right to force guilt upon those who may well be innocent?

To bring this full circle, you may recall at the beginning of this post I spoke about the intentions of readers who send me hot news tips. Yes, I am indeed making some assumptions about what motivated them to contact me, and yes, they are based in a gut feeling as much as anything resembling proof. Jumping to conclusions is a very easy trap to fall in, but it’s still not fair of me to impose my under-informed interpretations on my tipsters’ e-mails…any more than it’s fair to impose under-informed interpretations on the actions of Tim Madden or the folks at the I&M.

Enjoy my stupid tradition of making up a silly “card” on Photoshop.

“We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future.”
- Criswell, “Plan 9 From Outer Space”

With the holidays upon us, I suppose I should indulge in one of those “2009 in preview” pieces that make wildly inaccurate predictions about the coming year. Far be it from me to refuse the easy way out!

The national political complexion (figuratively and literally) changed markedly this year, and hopefully for the better, but there wasn’t too much turnover on the Cape; three out of four contested county races got some new blood, but both State Senators and six of our seven State Representatives were returned to office.

That seventh seat, previously held by Eric Turkington (D – Falmouth), has gone to Tim Madden of Nantucket, making him the first new guy in that gig in 20 years.

Madden won the four-way race thanks to a very strong outpouring of voter support on his hometown, and that was because everyone on that Island is related. Did you know that? Yep, everyone is at least a distant cousin of everyone else, though they ship in virgins from the mainland periodically to keep the gene pool fresh. Those imports were responsible for the few votes that went to other candidates, but everyone else said, “C’mon, folks! We gotta rally ‘round Cousin Timmy!”

(They celebrated the victory by swilling to excess a local form of moonshine made from cranberries and cod liver oil, known colloquially as “Codsnot.” When mixed with Goldschlager it becomes a “Nantucket Sleigh Ride to Hell”…I do not recommend it.)

One of Madden’s first orders of business will be to officially switch from an unenrolled resident to a Democrat. After that, he will grow a mustache, drop a few pounds, amass a staggering collection of neckties with little Cape Cods on them, and develop a dry, acerbic sense of humor and a knack for pointed commentary. Then, one day, Eric Turkington will completely take over his new host body and serve the district for another 20 years.

Fun fact: the Massachusetts Republican Party lost three seats in the Legislature this year, and the House and Senate now have a record low GOP presence of 19 members and five members, respectively. This will instill gnawing paranoia in the remaining Republicans, and both Jeff Perry (R – Sandwich) and Sue Gifford (R – Wareham) will go through a long string of interns, who will all quit because they’re really sick of always having to enter a room first, start their boss’s cars, and test their food for poison.

State Senator Rob O’Leary (D – Barnstable) will continue to arrive at events 15 minutes late.

(If you know O’Leary, that joke is a howl.)

Despite his defeat in the primaries, Lance Lambros will continue to show up for Barnstable County Commissioners meetings…it’ll be like when Jon Lovitz left “Saturday Night Live” in 1990 but kept coming back for cameos. After a few weeks of this, Mary LeClair will gently take him out of the meeting room and assure him that there is indeed a morning after. Mary will then go back to training for the Ironman Triathlon in Zurich (July 12, 2009).

The commissioners’ counterparts at the Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates will lose most of their members halfway into the year when someone says, “I don’t believe in the Assembly of Delegates!” and they drop dead. The survivors will be from Falmouth, Barnstable, and Yarmouth — the towns with more than enough people to clap their hands to show, yes, they DO believe in the Assembly.

The rest of the session will be carried out by this new power trio, because really, they decide everything already and all those other delegates just get in the way.

In his career, State Rep. Matt Patrick (D – Falmouth) has supported same-sex marriage, fought corporations to make them pay their fair share of taxes, and championed renewable energy. During a NORML rally he will unwittingly eat some Ben & Jerry’s “Dave Matthews Band Magic Brownies – Encore Edition” that has been, shall we say, enhanced. This will trigger an “Altered States” sort of effect and cause Patrick to devolve into a full-blown hippie.

This transformation will go largely unnoticed by all, though his legislative colleagues will wonder why Patrick is calling them “fatcats” more often than usual.

Sadly, 2009 will prove US Senator Ted Kennedy’s last hurrah. He will gracefully step down to deal with his health problems and spend more time with his family. This will spark a firestorm on par with the 2003 gubernatorial races in California as dozens of politicians, regardless of their qualifications, jockey to become the state’s new junior Senator.

Mitt Romney, in his eternal quest to become President, will run so he can pad his résumé further, but will fail when voters remember what a ginormous tool he is. Dianne Wilkerson figures no one in Washington will care about her quaint little bribery charge, so she’ll throw her hat in the ring (then later accept a bribe from Romney to drop out). Ed O’Reilly and Jeff Beatty will enter the race, figuring they have a better chance if there’s no incumbent to hand them their heads, but their campaigns will quickly crumble since all they can talk about is how much John Kerry sucks.

Insane money will be spent. Vicious attack ads will be unleashed. Candidates will challenge one another to Thai rope fights. Drive-by shootings will plague campaign headquarters. Massachusetts will be reduced to a smoldering wasteland. But from the ashes of this apocalypse will rise a mighty new figure to lead us to a new era of splendor and magnificence.

Ladies and gentlemen…I give you US Senator Rob Zombie (D – Haverhill).

“My friends, you have seen this incident, based on sworn testimony. Can you prove that it didn’t happen?”

When my then-girlfriend (and later wife) decided to move in together, we wound up settling in Middleboro.

It was an ideal compromise community for us; she lived and worked in the city, I on the Cape, and neither of us wanted to give up established, stable careers in a mediocre economy, so we moved to Middleboro. It was a great set-up. I’d drop her off at the Middleboro/Lakeville T stop two minutes from our apartment so she could commute to her job, then drive 45 minutes to the Cape — it was a straight shot down 495 at 6:30 AM, so it was a fast 45 minutes — to get to mine.

The town was great, too. Very quiet, not very developed — a lot like the Cape in the late 1970s, I’d say, before the developers went bonkers. We’d planned on buying our house there. We believed Middleboro might very well be the town in which we grew old together.

And then the casino rolled on in.

I remember covering the initial meetings between the Middleboro selectmen and the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, and how a lot of people were blinded by the dollar signs. The town was having some tough times financially and needed an influx of revenue, and many people — the selectmen among them — saw a casino as their fiscal White Knight. Town leaders embraced the proposal a little too quickly for my tastes, and when the town formally voted during a special town meeting to welcome a casino, I knew it was time to get the hell out of Dodge. No way did I want to live in a casino town. I just couldn’t swallow that a casino would bring a literal wealth of benefits to town with little to no negative impacts.

The meeting was held in the high school’s athletic field under brutally hot conditions. By the time the voting had wrapped I’d been out there for about six hours and had had enough, on every level. I walked home, and as it turns out, I missed the grand dramatic entrance of Glenn Marshall, the casino proposal’s point man. He’d been hanging out nearby, waiting for the vote to be cast so he could sweep on down to the field and sign an agreement with the selectmen there and then.

Prior to that eventful meeting, Marshall had made appearances at other presentations and discussions, all the while presenting himself as a man who only wanted the best for his newly federally recognized tribe, and certainly didn’t want to reap these gains at the expense of the people of Middleboro. He wanted everyone to be happy and share the wealth that the casino would generate.

Now Marshall has been outed as a charlatan of the worst kind. He has copped to skimming money from the tribe for selfish personal use, scamming the government out of unearned Social Security benefits, and granting financial favors to an as-yet unnamed inner circle of cronies within the tribe (who, I’m sure, will also be revealed as soon as Marshall makes good on his promise to the feds to name names in exchange for immunity from further prosecution).

How many Middleboro residents are now thinking they’ve been sold a bill of goods? How many town leaders — who will likely never admit to it — are thinking they’ve been played as suckers? How many tribal members are furious that a man who led them to their greatest moment, receiving federal recognition as an honest-to-God Native American tribe, has utterly betrayed their faith in him…and perhaps worse, that many others they currently view as their leaders will be revealed as complicit in Marshall’s crimes?

There’s been some talk that the casino deal will go on. Some folks are saying, Hey, our deal is with the tribe, not with Marshall, so there’s no reason to back out now.

These people need to step back and reassess this whole situation. Middleboro was told by an allegedly honorable group of men that building a big honkin’ Foxwoods-style resort casino would be as good as the Money Fairy swooping down from on high to shower everyone with crisp new $20 bills on a daily basis. Well, the leader of that group has proven nothing more than a greedy, self-interested fraud; his colleagues may soon join him; and the cold hard realities of the economy have taken the polish off the casino industry, which has seen massive dropoffs in revenue. Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods are both laying off hundreds of people from the high-paying jobs the Middleboro resort promises to generate.

Perhaps this is indeed the right time to build such a facility; get it built while things are cool, so that the casino will be up and ready to go when the economy turns around and people are feeling reckless with their money once again. But to paraphrase the old axiom, would you buy a casino proposal from these men?

On some level I hope the casino does go forward…otherwise, it means I left a town I’d quickly grown to love for no good reason, all because of lies delivered with an unwavering bright smile that said Trust me…lies delivered by Glenn Marshall.

Yeah, it’s that time again: time for everyone to get into a pointless knot over which greeting they receive at retail stores.

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: I don’t give a toss whether I get a “Merry Christmas” or a “Happy Holidays”…as long as they’re not telling me “Go **** yourself,” I’m cool.

The argument, as always, is over the exorcism of Christ from Christmas; the argument is that refusing to even say the word is part of some greater effort to secularize the holiday and strip it of its alleged Christian roots. I say “alleged” because Christmas is a essentially co-opted pagan holiday, and sorry, people, there’s ample historical proof to back me up on that one.

I disagree. I see running with a very generic slogan as a wholly understandable (if kinda gutless) reaction by the retail industry to those people on the opposite end of this foolishness: those who get themselves in a knot over a greeting that excludes everything but Christmas. Going with the all-inclusive, if bland, “Happy Holidays” is the best option in a no-win scenario, because you know it’s happened somewhere: someone went and scrounged themselves up a lawyer to sue a place for not offering a Christmas-specific platitude. Even in today’s frivolous litigation-happy society, you really have to push the bounds of jerkdom to claim you suffered emotional distress because someone wished you well in the most general of manners, so in simple terms of liability, I’d think “Happy Holidays” is more defensible than “Merry Christmas.”

(If there are any lawyers out there who would care to expound upon this — without claiming billable hours — please do.)

Whatever holiday you subscribe to, chances are it’s somehow based in a philosophy of peace, love, acceptance — you know, the good stuff in life. Why crap all over that just because someone’s being nice to you, just not in the precise way you’d like them to be?

One of the issues facing Cape Cod as a whole is its ongoing emigration of young people. Often you hear about the region losing its post-college age residents,a.k.a. the future of the Cape’s workforce; residents between ages 25 and 34 are the minority. There are twice as many senior citizens living here now, and they sure aren’t going to give up their golden years to patch holes in the workforce…not that they could in many cases (unless you know some 65-year-olds who can swap out a crashed server).

The reason frequently cited for this bleeding is affordability. Whether renting or buying, homes on the Cape are prohibitively expensive for the typical college grad, whose first priority is to land a gig that will allow him to pay both living expenses and his student loans, and perhaps allow for a few luxuries, like eating meat on a regular basis…believe me: you spend four years eating nothing but Ramen and Twinkies, and ground beef becomes more precious than gold.

Our elected officials tend to think that resolving this situation is a matter of improving two conditions; provide affordable housing and jobs that pay solid wages, and young people will stay on or come back to the Cape.

Affordability and the job market are two small elements of a larger and much more complex formula; there are many other reasons why Cape kids don’t stick around to become Cape adults, and we cannot hope to negate a lot of those influences, so it’s time for our local, regional, even state-level elected officials to admit the bitter truth: you aren’t going to succeed in reversing this particular tide. Young people are going, will continue to go, and in most cases will go for good. Next time you see them as residents, they’ll be buying their retirement homes.

A lot of kids are lost to the region the day they leave for college. Following high school, their old social bases are scattered to the four winds, so they start building new bases at college. They become emotionally attached to a whole new crowd, and those ties become stronger over time as their old ties weaken. By the time they’re ready to head out into the real world, they’ve lost one of their best reasons to come home; chances are, all their old high school chums are everywhere but on good ol’ Cape Cod, and precious few college grads are going to move back in with mom and dad if they can afford not to.

The seeds of this escape are planted early. If you’ve grown up on the Cape, you know that once you hit the magical age of 13, there is simply nothing to do around here until you’re old enough to hit the bars (and if that becomes your main source of entertainment, you’ve got deeper problems).

What is there for, say, the typical Falmouth teen? The town’s previous mecca for teen socialization, the Falmouth Mall, is no longer a viable location for the adolescent elite to meet and greet. Once the mall at least provided a sheltered gathering spot, vital during the cruel winter months, but now it’s open-air, and no way in hell would Wal-Mart allow teens to come in and loiter until closing time. The arcade on Main Street used to be a happenin’ spot — it was my home away from home for a huge chunk of my youth — but why go there and shell out a buck a pop to play video games when you’ve got a PlayStation at home?

Teens living in and around Boston have two things Cape kids sorely lack: available non-parental transportation and a wealth of social opportunities. When I was sixteen, I would have killed just to have the option of hopping the T and going to the Boston Garden (or whatever it was called at the time) to take in a concert from a major performer, or go to an all-ages club, or wander around the Museum of Science. If you’re a teenager on the Cape and you don’t have a friend with his own car, you’re limited to where ever your parents are willing to drive you, and you can bet the average parent in Truro isn’t going to haul their kid to the Cape Cod Mall just so they can get shuffled about by the rent-a-cops for a few hours.

Sure, the place is kinda hoppin’ during the summer months, but for 10 months out of the year, Cape Cod is, like, Snoozeville, daddio. That’s more than enough to give the average teen a healthy case of wanderlust, and as the saying goes, how’re you going to keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen Paris?

To repeat: you can’t.

I admit to occasionally feeling wistful and nostalgic for Falmouth. My last apartment in town, before I moved off-Cape to be with my wife, was next door to Kappy’s. On a whim I could grab a book and trot over to Starbucks to chug coffee and read, zip over to Paul’s to grab some pizza for dinner, then settle in with some movies from Video Paradise. Peking Palace and the Clam Shack were two minutes away driving time, my office at the Enterprise three.

Meanwhile, all my friends in Boston and Revere and Saugus and Salem and Gloucester and Brockton and Bellingham and Lynn and Swampscott and Nahant were having a grand old time. And if I wanted to join them? Hello, two-hour drive.

Even if I could afford to live on the Cape, I wouldn’t. My life isn’t here anymore. It’s elsewhere, and that’s where I want to be.

Cape Cod has a lot more to worry about than providing decent wages and reasonably priced homes. It has to provide young people with a full, well-rounded life, and that’s not happening overnight, or even in this generation. The future of the Cape’s workforce isn’t in high school or even elementary school, it’s in kindergarten and preschool. Give them what they need at every level — financially and socially — and you have a shot at keeping them around after college.

Otherwise? Better hope gramps is better at reformatting hard drives than he is setting the clock on his VCR.