By Charles Lane

Chief Fire Engineer Patrick Sullivan briefed the Board on the department’s needs for additional funding.

The City of Somerville Board of Aldermen considered and ultimately approved several funding measures brought forward at its latest regular meeting on March 10.

The first, a request by Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone, asked the Board to approve a grant of $50,000 from the MA Office of Public Safety for Fire Dept. staffing.

A special gathering took place at City Hall last Saturday celebrating Greek Independence Day and honoring George Dilboy, the first Greek American to receive a Medal of Honor during WWI.

By Blake Maddux

Petty Morals will be gracing the stage at Once Lounge and Ballroom on Friday, March 25. — Photo by Joshua Pickering

“The Rolling Stones are like our spirit animal,” says Lauren Recchia, aka LoWreck, drummer for the Salem, MA-based synth-punk band Petty Morals.

In addition to the musical influence of the Stones, this all-female sextet took its name from a 1967 Keith Richards quote.

By Josie Grove

Suspension of late night service is regarded as necessary by the MBTA.

The last late-night trains passed through Somerville’s lone subway station at Davis Square shortly after 2 a.m. on March 19. Train and bus service from midnight until 2 a.m. was a year-long pilot program introduced in March of 2014 and extended for another year in March 2015. The service’s cost outpaced its revenues. Although all MBTA service runs a deficit, this one was particularly large: revenues covered just 16.5% of the late-night service’s costs in 2014.

By Margaux Maxwell

The Saturday show had all the usual weirdness and aerobatics of the circus act. — Photo by Margaux Maxwell

Cirque Us! announced the theme of their 2016 summer tour at their first fundraiser show this Saturday, March 19 at Aircraft Aerial Arts in Somerville: One Man’s Trash, a Repurposed Circus.

The Saturday show had all the usual weirdness and aerobatics of the circus act: clowns, tightrope walkers, acrobats, trapeze, music, jugglers and stunts (without the animal cruelty). But with a crew that moves towns every week and can be seen at an affordable price of $10-15, Cirque Us! brings something else to communities.

EXTRA! EXTRA! EXTRA! The Somerville Journal office has left the city and moved to Danvers. Is that a sign of The Times? The long established Somerville Journal has been losing readers over the past 10 years or so and the only feature that people bought the paper for was Speak Out, but that ended late last year. The Cambridge Chronicle and Somerville Journal both were longtime local weeklies, many decades as community papers that have become regional papers, but now moved on. The Cambridge Chronicle has moved to Lexington, which is two towns away, but the Somerville Journal will be run out of the Danvers office. Are they trying to tell us something with that move? Guess this means we are now the only locally owned and operated paper, which by the way has significantly increased its readership in Somerville over the past several months. We are right here at 699 Broadway, in Ball Square, while the other so-called paper is a post office box, or you have to make an appointment to go to their office. We could go on, but our readers know the difference, don’t you?

By Jim Clark

GateHouse CEO Kirk Davis has not been reached for comment regarding the Journal’s relocation.

The parent company of The Somerville Journal, GateHouse Media, has decided to move its office out of Somerville, opting instead for a new location in Danvers.

The move by GateHouse Media, a subsidiary of New York-based New Media Investment Group, is one of a series of cost-cutting measures recently implemented by the company.

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On a recent visit to Slumbrew, I tried some of their rotating brews, including the Yankee Swap (2015), a barrel-aged Belgian Quad aged in rum barrels and the Super Luma, a triple IPA version of their Luma Luma. If you’re thinking of trying a new brew, check out the sampler fights or customize your own.

By Jim Clark

On the evening of March 17, police responded to a report of someone damaging a gate at a Stone Ave. location.

Upon arrival, the officers met with the reporting party and were told that a man had been pulling at a wooden gate on the victim’s property. When the suspect, later identified as Edward Tarencz, was confronted by the victim he reportedly tore a piece of the gate off and said to the victim, “I’ll burn you alive.”

Erring on the side of caution is all fine and good, but it can be taken a bit too far from time to time.

Case in point: the curious matter of calling “snow emergencies” whenever the slightest hint of a flurry makes the evening news weather forecast.