I've been struck by something in the news recently: hazing. There have been a couple of incidents, in Needham and now Agawam, making the news. Hazing is one of those things that for many years was considered perfectly normal and acceptable -- people doing it might have been concerned with how it could look to some people, but didn't think they were actually doing anything wrong, or anything they could, or should, get in trouble for.

Just casting around with the old noggin....

--As bored political journos and commentators start talking 2012 GOP Presidential chances, we've seen a bunch of back-and-forthing about whether Mitt Romney can lay claim to the critical perception of "next in line" for the nomination, and about just how critical that perception is.

If you're on Twitter (or have been waiting for an excuse to start), do a search for #MAheritage -- a thread I started in an offhand Tweet yesterday, and which took off into a great list of all things Massachusetts.

The original notion came from a news item about a UNESCO program, which tries to do for the world's intangible cultural assets what the World Heritage Foundation does for physical objects, like great architecture.

It's long been my contention that, as in all matters, Baby Boomers will hold onto political offices until Millennials are ready to take them over, completely skipping my lazy-ass slacker Gen-X brethren.

It turns out some of us are getting elected -- especially as Republicans.

We're getting into the years when, by all rights, we slackers should be getting elected -- certainly to Congress, and even Senate.

The other day I did my latest rankings of the most likely 2012 GOP Presidential nominees -- an exercise I've been doing roughly every two months since the end of 2008. Now some upstarts have decided to join me with their first rankings of the cycle: Chris "The Fix" Cillizza at WaPo, and the National Journal's Hotline. Also, there's been a fair amount of comment about such rankings.

In this week's issue of the Boston Phoenix -- in print tomorrow, online now -- I look at the notoriously irrelevant Boston City Council, and note that it has been acting surprisingly relevant in the past year.

The Council is in an interesting period of transition. New at-large councilors Felix Arroyo and Ayanna Pressley got elected a year ago, a new member will be elected next week to replace John Tobin, and it's likely that Chuck Turner will be removed next month, triggering another special election.

Pop Quiz: What is Peter Bragdon's phone number?

Don't have it? Don't know who Peter Bragdon is? Guess you're not a Republican running for President.

Bragdon will be Senate President following the Republican takeover in New Hampshire this week. Bragdon also chaired the Republican Senate Majority Committee, which helped elect a stunning 19 GOP candidates to the 24 state senate seats.

As I wrote last week, the election results appear to have left Republicans with the same miserably low representation by women in elected office as they had coming in. As I concluded: "The GOP's elected officials are and will be essentially 90% male for some years to come."

Throughout this election cycle (and before) I've been trying to understand why the Republican Party has such a horrendous record of electing women.

Here, finally, is my take on the Charlie Baker campaign. You can take all the particular criticisms of the campaign strategy; all the dissections of Baker's persona; all the praise of Deval Patrick's get-out-the-vote operation... there's still an overarching reason that Baker lost badly in a race where he should have won easily.

As I wrote last week, the election results appear to have left Republicans with the same miserably low representation by women in elected office as they had coming in. As I concluded: "The GOP's elected officials are and will be essentially 90% male for some years to come."

Throughout this election cycle (and before) I've been trying to understand why the Republican Party has such a horrendous record of electing women.

I'll be posting in the next couple of days about where I think things really stand in terms of women in Republican politics, now that we've seen this cycle play out. But for now, here are some estimates of how things went, by the numbers.

These are my best figures, for now, of the number and percentage of women among Republican elected officials at various levels, going into Tuesday's elections, and resulting from those elections.

You can't blame state Republican officials for touting their party's gains in the state house of representatives, where their numbers will rise from 15 to between 30 and 32, depending on final tallies. That's their job -- they're supposed to draw attention to anything resembling a good nugget of information among the enormous pile of failure.

The Massachusetts House of Representatives came within a hair's-breadth of losing its pro-choice majority as a result of Tuesday's elections, but will squeak through with a bare edge of 81 of 160 members.

Choice advocates, who count 95 supporters in the House now, briefly believed Tuesday night that the tally would fall below 80.

Four years ago, Deval Patrick went in front of a gathering of editors and publishers and told them that they had all totally missed the story of his campaign, which was his incredible grassroots operation. True as it may have been, it's probably not too smart to start off your gubernatorial relationship with the media by telling them that you know how to do their jobs better than they do.