Monthly Archives For November 2004
nieve
yup. it’s snowing right now outside the Otis House here in Boston. I LOVE IT! Snow is one of my favorite things in the whole world, and you couldn’t find a happier clam than me right now!
By Rebecca | 11.12.2004 | 01:04 PM | Permalink | Categories: Outdoors | 1 Comment
New England’s Character
These days, people are trying to let statistics do the talking.
Before the election, this op-ed in the Boston Globe claimed that Massachusetts and the Northeast were leading the nation in family values, in this case because of Massachusetts’ lowest-in-the-nation divorce rate. This is thanks to the predominantly Catholic population and the higher-than-average level of education.
Then we have a newsbrief in the Globe that says New England is the wealthiest region in the United States, but ranks the lowest in terms of rate of charitable giving. Yep, we’re a bunch of filthy-rich scrooges. Would other states continue to give at the same rate if they were making as much money as New Englanders?
Finally, there is the infamous list of states ranked by average IQ, with the Presidential candidate they voted for. It “showed” overwhelmingly that the states with the highest IQs tended to vote for Kerry. That chart was based on data from this page which now notes that some people have debunked the chart, and that a journal that originally published the chart issued a retraction. This page claims to debunk the original chart by using more balanced data. The results are all so subject to error it’s not even funny. I blame both sides for trying to gauge the intelligence of a state’s voters by the results of standardized tests that not every voting-age citizen has taken.
By Peter | 11.11.2004 | 06:10 PM | Permalink | Categories: Current Events | No Comments
Five Scenarios
Tonight, after we finished dinner at the Salem Taco Bell, we pulled out of the shopping plaza parking lot as usual, in the right hand turn lane. We merged onto Highland Avenue, which at that point is a four-lane divided highway, and traveled in the right-hand lane. Just a few hundred feet later, a black sedan pulled out of a driveway to the right, and swerved right into our path. Here are five scenarios as to what might have happened next:
What Really Happened I hit the brakes, bringing our car to a stop and allowing the sedan to safely merge onto the road.
The Correct Boston Driver Scenario I swerved quickly into the left-hand lane to avoid the sedan. I did not use my turn signal, and I did not check behind me to see if any traffic was coming up in the left-hand lane. I narrowly avoided disaster, missing the car coming behind me in the left lane by inches. He honked his horn. I honked my horn. The guy in the black sedan honked his horn too. Some guy a few blocks away heard it and started honking his horn.
The James Bond Scenario I flipped a toggle switch on my dashboard, deploying both the port and starboard missles hidden underneath my car. I then pressed a button on my steering wheel to fire both of the missiles directly at the sedan. The sedan exploded in a ball of fire, and I hit the accelerator to zoom right through it. I then pulled a 180-degree turn, deployed the machine guns, and gunned down all of the cars behind me - just for good measure. Also, my car was a brand-new BMW roadster.
The Future World Scenario I pulled up on the yoke of my flying car, skimming quickly over the other car, wishing that my car really could made that cool, zippy sound that The Jetsons had me hoping for.
The Absolutely Crazy, Never Going To Happen, Not In A Million Years, Fantasy Scenario The situation was avoided entirely because the driver of the black sedan actually stopped, looked at the road, realized a car was coming, and decided not to pull out into traffic!
By Peter | 11.10.2004 | 07:34 PM | Permalink | Categories: Life Near Boston | 2 Comments
Meatloaf Haiku
Outside it is cold I ate hot meatloaf for lunch It was made with love
By Peter | 11.10.2004 | 12:39 PM | Permalink | Categories: Married Life | No Comments
Marky Mark and the Turtle Bunch
I was home in Townsend over night Sunday/Monday. While I was there Dad decided to move their dvd/vcr/cd/tape deck/am-fm from their long time home into the closet in the den. During the transfer some of my old cassette tapes were unearthed. Peter was treated to a little look into my 6th and 7th grade taste in music. Believe me, I was just as appalled!
Tape one: A Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch single dated 1991. I don’t think I really liked the ‘B’ side song : “On the House Tip”, but I remember playing and replaying the ‘A’ side: Wild Side, a remix/make of an old Lou Reed song.
I’m not sure why I liked it so much, It just makes me laugh today. If you take a minute to read the lyrics in the link above, you’ll notice the long verse about Charles and Carol. It just so happens that that story took place here in Boson in 1990. I found this interesting article that gives some background of the story. Maybe the fact that it was a local story made me more interested in the song. NOTE: the fact that the article has lyrics playing off the “Charlie on the MTA” is just a dumb coincidence to Peter’s previous posts.
Tape Two: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:The Original Movie Soundtrack vintage 1990. The tape features songs by such fantastic artists like, M.C. Hammer, Spunkadelic, and Partners in Kryme in addition to some great “talking song” bits by Splinter.
I am not too proud to admit that I saw all three TMNT movies in the theater and could also be found with Corey and Meghan on the back patio lip-syncing and dancing to the songs on this very tape. I was a huge TMNT fan, but I’m just starting to wonder about a few things. Well, one at the moment… Splinter was a pet rat from Japan, he winds up in New York, finds some radioactive sludge and four baby turtles. Splinter notices that the turtles and he start to grow abnormally; but he also senses his intellegence growing. WHY didn’t the intellect of the turtles grow as well? ALSO, if Splinter is such a big-shot Japanese rat, why did he name the turtles after Italian Renaissance artists instead of historic Japanese figures? I don’t get it.
By Rebecca | 11.09.2004 | 09:59 AM | Permalink | Categories: Music | 1 Comment
Charlie Who?
Another Boston Globe article on the MBTA’s new CharlieCard notes:
qqq|
Some riders, particularly the young, had no clue about Charlie.
”I thought maybe it had something to do with the Charles River,” said Kara Kitner of Boston, emerging from a Green Line trolley. When the reference was explained, she predicted, ”People won’t know.”
Ted Holmes of Newton agreed. ”Ask anyone under 30: Charlie just isn’t going to mean anything,” he said. ”It was almost 60 years ago.”
…
MBTA General Manager Michael Mulhern said the T’s marketing experts warned that Charlie might not be recognized.
”It did come up when we were weighing the pros and cons of the different names, but we wanted a card with a strong connection to Boston, Boston’s history, and at same time weave in some MBTA history, and the song does that,” Mulhern said. ”It transcends generations. And now we have a fictional character all our own, that is uniquely Boston’s, that other transit systems don’t have.”
…
As for some younger T riders not getting the Charlie reference, [interviewee Coco] Delgado said, ”Get the Dropkick Murphys to record a version of it, and you’re golden.”
|qqq
Out of a brief survey of the two people available at the moment (my wife and me), both respondents were familiar with the song “Charlie on the MTA.” Both of us are under 30. Becky is familiar with the song because, she says, “I had probably heard it on the oldies station.” I, on the other hand, am familiar with the song because one of my computer science professors at Gordon told us about it to illustrate a point.
I guess this just means that other young folk will have to become more in touch with their cultural heritage. What a shame!
By Peter | 11.09.2004 | 07:55 AM | Permalink | Categories: Life Near Boston | No Comments
Site Accesories
Allow me to direct your attention to a few new features I’ve added to the site. If you’re reading this via RSS, you won’t see any of these changes, so be sure to visit prwdot.org to see them.
We have added some new names to the list of Friends on the left. Be sure to check them all out - they represent people whose blogs we regularly read, or at least people we keep in touch with on a regular basis (Corey, for example, doesn’t even have a blog).
Also at the footer of each entry is an ‘Email This Entry’ link. This will bring up a form that allows you to send a link to that entry to the email address of your choice. Use this if you see an entry you would like to send to a friend, or if you would like to send yourself a note to read it when you get home. This isn’t all that new, but nonetheless it appears to be underutilized.
There is now a ‘Contact Us’ page, that pulls together all of the information on how to get in touch with us. Find it on the left hand side of our page under ‘Our Site’. It includes a link to a fun, user-friendly email form.
Finally, if you haven’t figured this out already, the photographic banner at the top of our site changes each time you load the page. There are over 20 different banners to be seen, and all you have to do to see them is click around on our site! (Simply clicking on the banner over and over will work fine, but we’d rather you click around on other pages too!)
Enjoy, and as always, feel free to share any comments or suggestions!
By Peter | 11.08.2004 | 08:54 PM | Permalink | Categories: Site Updates | No Comments
CharlieCard
Boston.com reports that the MBTA, the oldest public transit system in the United States, is finally ditching its token system and switching over to a passcard system. The system will be called the “CharlieCard”, in reference to the 1940’s Boston political song, Charlie on the MTA. The song concerns a man named Charlie, who paid ten cents to get on the T, but didn’t have the change to pay the five cent exit fare - a hot political issue at the time. Charlie’s fate is left up in the air, or down in the ground, so to speak - he just keeps riding along on the MTA.
I’m looking forward to the new system. It will be nice to be able to load fares onto a card, and keep that handy, as opposed to needing to buy tokens and have them jingling around in your pocket while traveling. Even better would be if I could use my debit card at a machine to add value to the CharlieCard, as I rarely carry cash. But I don’t know if they have any plans for that. As an aside, our laundromat switched from a quarters system to a smart-card system a while back, and it’s been great just having to slide that card into the washers and driers to do a load or two or three. You even get bonus credits if you add $5 or more at a time.
As for tokens: You might want to buy a stash of tokens before it’s too late - they could be collectors items some day!
ppp||ppp
By Peter | 11.08.2004 | 07:22 PM | Permalink | Categories: Life Near Boston | No Comments
Blogger Code
My blogger code:
B9 d t+ k+ s u f i o+ x-- e+ l c--
(decode it!)
By Peter | 11.08.2004 | 05:16 PM | Permalink | Categories: Quizzes | No Comments
An Explanation
For those of you who aren’t named Chad, or aren’t otherwise technologically inclined, I’ll try to put the previous post into layman’s terms. I think this is probably about half of our audience. For the other half (Nikkiana, Mike, Chad, etc), feel free to skip this post. Continue reading…
By Peter | 11.07.2004 | 07:40 PM | Permalink | Categories: Techie | No Comments