Cute story I found about the Kerry girls

Vanessa, a Harvard medical school student, told of her father's attempts to tell her about the "birds and the bees" during her teenage years, saying that he turned "different shades of red." She said he takes time out from politics to offer her a shoulder to cry on.

"I broke up with a boyfriend a while ago, and I came home sobbing pathetically and Dad was so sweet," Vanessa said. "He just put his arms around me and held me and told me, 'It's okay. I know it's hard and it's rough now, but you will get past it.'"

We're a little funny when it comes to giving people the star treatment here. Chefs and newscasters, jocks and furniture salesmen, professors and pols - these are our biggest celebrities. Is something wrong with us? Maybe we're the only ones getting it right in these celebrity-obsessed times.

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How many other places in America hang on every word tripping out of the mouths of guys like Harvard president Lawrence Summers and Boston University's uber-powerful John Silber? What similar-sized community brings together business guru Jack Welch, cancer guru Dr. Judah Folkman, and Car Talk gurus Tom and Ray Magliozzi? Could any other city inspire hundreds of famous authors ranging from Robert B. Parker to Ha Jin, yet be governed by the often unintelligible Mayor Thomas Menino? And where else might an orthopedic surgeon named Bill Morgan be asked to autograph baseballs, just because he performed a bizarre little surgery on Sox ace Curt Schilling?

Even in the sports arena we follow our own gold standard of teamwork, giving our hearts more freely to the no-nonsense Tedy Bruschis and Jason Variteks than we ever will to a Terry Glenn or a Pedro Martinez. (Not that we'll decline your services if you want to help us win a world championship or lay claim to an Oscar, of course.)

Massachusetts has always been a place that rewards humility and shouts down the selfish.

Ever hear of the crab-bucket syndrome? As explained in Ron Suskind's book about urban schools, A Hope in the Unseen, it plays off the notion that crabs piled into a bucket don't need a lid, because if any one of them tries to escape, the other crabs will drag it back down, ensuring that they all share the same fate. If any town in the United States is the capital of the crab-bucket syndrome, it's Boston.