Hot Mama Drama
Everybody likes a little name recognition. But maybe there’s such a thing as having a too-famous name.
Virginia Realtor Carolyn Capalbo is a perfectly nice woman who sells houses for a living. New Jersey’s Carolyn Capalbo is a perfectly nice woman whose daughter, Ashley Dupre, was the call girl who brought down New York Governor Eliot Spitzer in 2008.
The flood of phone calls from the national media; the sympathetic, if misguided, glances from the other kid’s parents at school pickup; overhearing her bank manager asking her loan officer if she was that Carolyn Capalbo – none of that was much fun we imagine for the home-selling Capalbo.
But probably the worst part for the erstwhile Southern Capalbo was that for the past two years, a Google search for her name produces as the top result telephoto shots of a dark-haired woman in sunglasses lounging in a string bikini (her daughter beside her)… and the Realtor’s headshot.
Last week Ms. Capalbo (Va.) sent up a cri di couer on her blog, recounting the tale of her business-besmirching Internet doppelganger, and the Realtor posse has ridden to her rescue. Blogging Realtors across the innertubes have taken to keyboard to post their own notes of encouragement to Ms. You-Know-Who, with links to her blog in an effort to make her realty business the number one result on a search for her name. It seems to be working – sort of. A search conducted late last week brought a mixed bag-. The first three links were related to the call-girl baby mama. But seven of the next nine links took us to our Realtor friend. Success? Depends if you’re looking to buy a home or have a good time.
Green? Yawn.
The Teller, always keen to protect the environment, was interested to read recently that the Boston Harbor Association launched its first "green" water taxi this month.
We briefly held dim hopes of seeing some kind of rad, new, killer speedboat that ran on recycled cans and tore through the water like something out of Miami Vice.
Instead, well, it’s just an electric boat.
See, this is why some people struggle to get behind environmentalism: Electric boats, in our experience, are lame and slow and meant for elderly people who are scared of noise and speed. Kind of like golf carts for the high seas.
But we realize that not everybody is as hardcore-extreme as The Teller, and some people actually enjoy quiet, leisurely trips across the water. And now, those people can pile in a 12-seater and putter between Rowes Wharf, Logan International Airport and 30 other locations around the harbor.
When it comes to transportation, "green" doesn’t always go hand-in-hand with "fast" and "awesome." We’re hoping Science can get to work and find a way to hurl us over the water with the wind in our hair, accompanied by some face-melting metal music blaring away (we told you we were hardcore-extreme), but do so in a way that doesn’t significantly increase our carbon footprint or dump chemicals into the oceans. The oceans, after all, have had a rough go of things lately.
Until then, we applaud the harbor association’s launch of "Unplugged" (the boat’s name), and hope it proves a successful venture that sparks more earth-friendly vessels in the water.
