Published June 1, 2010

Out of beer (Chris Devers/Flickr)

Did you try to celebrate the long weekend yesterday by picking up a six-pack at your neighborhood liquor store? If you’re like me, you scratched your head when you got turned away.

Turns out Massachusetts bans liquor sales on Memorial Day. It’s just one of the commonwealth’s arcane blue laws, which might have made sense in the Puritan days, but which now just make it hard to drink on the days you most want to — weekends and holidays.

I got a little lost trying to make sense of it all, so I called Ralph Sacramone, executive director of the state’s Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission. Here’s the rub.

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Published June 1, 2010

(Peter Blanchard/Flickr)

Summer is about to start, which means families across Massachusetts are scrambling to find child care for the next three months.

The newsroom is collecting stories of innovative child care, and we want to hear yours. What do you do with the kids? Camp is expensive — prohibitively so for many families. My colleague Deborah Becker tells me a friend volunteered her child to wash dishes at a camp so that he could attend free. The family could only afford one or two weeks of the 12-week, multi-thousand-dollar program.

Some towns are offering public, low-cost summer programs on a first come, first served basis. Apparently the demand is so high in some places that parents queue up in the middle of the night. A quick Google search reveals Sudbury, Littleton, Franklin and Littleton are some of the towns that offer these public programs. The enrollment period is now.

Share your summer child care stories in the comments. We may like to contact you, so please leave a real e-mail address. (Your e-mail address will never be published on wbur.org.)

• @TENACITYtweet tweets: our summer #tennis & reading program is free & @ 20+ #Boston parks! Check us out: www.tenacity.org
• @nika7k tweets: taking 2 of mine on a camping trip as I teach people how to raise and milk goats sustainably

Published June 1, 2010

You gotta admit, for a company speculated to be considering an IPO for years, waiting didn’t cost it a good ticker symbol. If all goes well, Zipcar will soon trade on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the zippy little moniker “ZIP.”

Zipcar is a Cambridge company.

In a regulatory filing, the Cambridge car-sharing company announced it’s filing for an initial public offering.  By going public, it hopes to raise as much $75 million.  It hasn’t said how many shares would be issued at what prices.

Zipcar rents cars mostly in metropolitan areas and on college campuses. It boasts 400,000 members, who pay a time-based rate but don’t have to worry about gas or insurance.

But ever since Zipcar hit the pavement in 2000, it has never made a profit.  That’s mainly because Zipcar has been growing, buying up competitors and moving into international markets such as London.

The SEC filing also reveals Zipcar is looking for more acquisitions and still may not make a profit for years.