Published June 15, 2010

Game time is 9 o’clock. If the Celtics win tonight, we win it all.

Want to meet the Bub? I’ll be starting my evening at The Four’s, a classy joint in that cluster of bars near the TD Garden. (Actually, I’m starting my evening at a different bar for a different story — beer tasting at Deep Ellum in Allston. I know, my life is hard.)

Be warned of traffic delays, especially around the Garden and Fenway Park. Many streets in those areas will be closed during the fourth quarter to prevent vandalism.

And be safe out there. In the past six years, three people have died celebrating major Boston sports victories. Boston police say they’re ready. And the Staties are sending in more than 100 troopers to beef up patrols.

Published June 15, 2010

The effort to find and rescue oil-soaked birds is too enormous for overtaxed and undertrained crews in the Gulf of Mexico.

MoGO (Mobile Gulf Observatory) is a new iPhone app created by UMass Amherst wildlife biolgists.

That’s why wildlife biologists at UMass Amherst are tapping the power of the crowd. A new iPhone app aims to create an army of “citizen scientists” by allowing people to snap and submit photos of animals in distress.

It’s called MoGO, for Mobile Gulf Observatory, and I just grabbed the free download (iTunes link). It’s dead simple: Select the animal (birds, sea turtles, marine mammals, fishes, seashore creatures) or the blight (tarballs, oil slicks, oiled habitats). Then take a photo. Then choose one: Alive, Injured, Dead. The photo is geotagged and submitted to the Wildlife Hotline, as well as a database the researchers are using to track the disaster.

The idea came to Charlie Schweik, the press release says, “as he listened to yet another depressing story about the Gulf oil spill.” Schweik, associate director of the National Center for Digital Government, turned to his colleagues at UMass to reach out to the fisheries and wildlife community.

UMass Amherst wildlife biologist Curt Griffin is our guest today on Radio Boston.

Meanwhile, the folks at eBird.org are mapping observations of endangered animals with the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Bird Tracker.

Published June 15, 2010

Newly released FBI files show the frequency and range of death threats against Sen. Edward M. Kennedy over four decades. This person fixated on the death of Mary Jo Kopechne on Chappaquiddick island.

“Mary Jo will haunt you to death.” It was scrawled over and over again on anonymous death threats for years after that fateful night.

Mary Jo did haunt him. In his 2009 memoir, Sen. Kennedy wrote that he “made terrible decisions” on Chappaquiddick. Decisions that haunted him for four decades, he said. You almost wonder if the sender doubted that.

It must have been a little less worrisome that the sender seemed crazy. Law enforcement eventually gave up searching. But the Mary Jo obsessor was only one of many people who wanted the senator dead, the documents show. The possible threats were endless, and they came from everywhere. The man who killed Bobby. The Ku Klux Klan. Even the Mafia, maybe, although those reports seem to have been a hoax.