A historical museum is a fitting centerpiece for the Bay Area's waterfront restoration. Encouraging tourism while celebrating the area's seaport heritage is a perfect symbol of how our area can reshape its future.

In times past, the waterfront of Marshfield and North Bend was a busy nexus of industry. Those days are gone, leaving behind a desert of broken concrete and decayed pilings. The landscape is uninviting to visitors and disheartening to locals.

If you have never contradicted yourself, you have failed to grasp some of the fundamental paradoxes of the human condition. Smoking is an anomaly that is often uncomfortable in a non-smoking world. Therefore, smokers must conform to the world more than it caters to them.

There has been an intense backlash in the cities about smokers and where they can and cannot smoke. The smokers may be right in declaring their smoking is neither a vice nor an illness. That's their prerogative but they are wrong, in my opinion, in designating it as merely a personal preference. That's fine if they consider where they are and who else is around before they light up (like on a desert island).