Category: Boston

Adam at Universal Hub wrote about some cool architectural grotesques around Boston today. One that caught my eye was the cow skull on the Boston 5 Cents Savings Bank. As I wrote in the comments, this isn’t a gruesome ornament but a classical one, which also appears in Jefferson’s architecture at the University of Virginia:

The drawing that Jefferson prepared for Pavilion II carried the notation that the order was based on the Ionic of the Temple of the Fortuna Virilis in Rome, which was illustrated in plates in The Architecture of A. Palladio; in Four Books. One of the distinguishing features of this order is that the volutes of the capitals at the outer corners of the columns are positioned diagonally at the ends of the portico. The Temple of Fortuna Virilis has a frieze of ox skulls, putti, ribbons, and garlands festooned with fruit motifs, which were also used in Pavilion II.

I wonder what the thematic significance of the ox skull was originally.

The Reverend Dr. Nancy Taylor pointed out from the pulpit of Old South Church on Sunday that Mother’s Day has deep ties to Boston, and to progressive thought. Julia Ward Howe, the author of the words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” called for the first Mother’s Day in 1870 as a day for peace, a protest against the carnage of war. (It was to take another 37 years to get an actual observance of the day, by which point it had morphed into a memorial day for mothers.) Here is Howe’s actual proclamation from 1870:

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts,
whether our baptism be that of water or of fears!

Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by
irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking
with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be
taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach
them of charity, mercy and patience.”

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another
country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From
the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says “Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance
of justice.”

Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons
of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a
great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women,
to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the
means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each
bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a
general congress of women without limit of nationality may be
appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at
the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the
alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement
of international questions, the great and general interests of
peace.

Interesting that somehow in the intervening 135 years between the first proclamation and today, Mother’s Day became about flowers, candy, and lunch out… Dr. Taylor’s sermon on the topic was thought-provoking; hopefully it will get posted soon. (I really need to talk to her about blogging.)

(I’m about two days behind on my blogging; I was thinking about writing this on Sunday but didn’t quite get there.)

It turns out that John Vanderslice was wrong; not only is time travel not lonely, but even the New York Times can’t resist writing about it—this weekend’s Time Traveler Convention at MIT, that is (see my previous post for more info). I particularly enjoyed the description of the MIT dorm room with the motorized couch and the “pizza button.” Isn’t that what all MIT dorm rooms are like?

Okay, pop quiz: what’s funnier than a bunch of MIT students deciding that this weekend will be the only ever Time Travelers’ Convention (because, technically, you would only need one time traveler convention)? First, the decision that it would be held in East Campus Courtyard, which certainly won’t hold all the necessary time travelers. Second, the story on CNet. And third, the comments on CNet, which as of this writing included:

• “I went last year. I was a bit disappointed as the only people there were a bunch of geek wanna-bes.”
• “Which parallel universe? They forgot to mention which parallel universe it was held in. My timeline led to 28,762 instances — of which 32 looked very likely — but I was low on Planck energy… ”

Finally, of course, the CNet story misses one very important thing: the proximity of the Time Travelers’ Convention to the Disco Dance Floor. I submit that this is nothing more than a cheap excuse for a party. Which of course I want to crash.

My new office is in Framingham, and it’s surrounded by big box stores. Coming in, I pass a financial services complex and a big box mall on my left, and a big box strip on my right. Just past my office is a big box grocery store (the “super” version of Stop and Shop). In a two mile radius can be found Office Max, Office Depot, Barnes & Noble, Home Depot, Target, Macy’s, Filene’s Basement, Best Buy, Tweeter, Comp USA, BJ’s wholesale club, and Old Navy, among many others, plus an assortment of supporting stores like Panera and Starbucks that seem to accompany the big boxes like birds picking insects out of a crocodile’s mouth.

Is it odd that I feel a sort of relief in the litany above? These are stores that can be found next to most white collar office parks. They were in Fairfax and in Redmond (or Bellevue), and tend to show up near most of the places I have traveled on business. Their purpose in life seems to be to place everything within reach that you might need to pick up on your lunch hour or on your way home from work. At this job they are very good. Big box stores are a little like APIs for office worker shopping; they make it easy and simple to accomplish known tasks and are present wherever you go.

Of course, that is their downside as well. There are no surprises with big box stores, only the same things you can buy everywhere else. And there is a terrible cost—in wasted space, in environmental impact (you need an SUV to take home all your big big purchases!), in health (have you ever eaten in the restaurants that cluster next to big boxes? They should all have standard defibrillators to go with the hubcap sized plates), in soul.

But oh, the convenience.

I’ve come a long way from three years ago, when I wrote about my confusion about Patriots’ Day (is it a day off to watch the Boston Marathon?). Now I live in a town that claims the highest number of first-day casualties within town borders—22 colonists and at least twice as many British regulars, more than either Lexington or Concord—in the American Revolution. The Lexington Minuteman rounds up all the facts and legends.

Update: Good coverage of some of the reenactment fun in downtown Arlington on Ben Hyde’s blog.

With the energy deficit I wrote about yesterday, I perhaps should not have walked from Harvard Square to Central Square along the Charles River yesterday afternoon after finishing the repair work on our kitchen doorway, prior to going to choir practice, prior to driving down to New Jersey. But it was too nice a day not to enjoy the sights.

Mercifully, it didn’t stick. I didn’t notice it though—after I returned from teaching the night’s SAT prep course, I decided to go see a movie.

(It seems like I do a lot of stuff for the first time during “batching” weeks. I haven’t been out to see a movie in a theatre by myself since I squirmed out of a showing of About a Boy the day I left Boston in 2002 to move to Seattle.)

I had meant to visit our town cinema, the Arlington Capitol Theatre, for about eight months, ever since moving here. Last night I learned two things—even on weeknights they have a good choice of movies in the 9:45 – 10:05 PM time slot, and one theatre pretty much looks like another once you get into the seats. I did like the entrance and lobby, though; very evocative (as was the mosaic tiled floor on the bathroom level in the basement!).

And the movie? I think A Very Long Engagement just entered the rank of my favorite films. Definitely a movie to make you want to go to the movies again.

I published a big backlog of photos to the web just now—three albums’ worth. They span from the last snow pictures of the winter (I hope) to a set at Quincy Market to a few pictures approaching the North End before Easter.

Wow, it feels good to get those out of the camera and online. Pictures aren’t real unless you can share them. (Probably why Kodak is rebranding Ofoto and why Flickr got purchased. Everybody wants to get in on the act.)

Last night was my first service as part of the choir at Old South Church. It felt a bit like a homecoming, somehow. We’ve been looking for a church since we got back to the east coast. The challenge for us has been to find a church with a traditional liturgy (in our opinion, a PowerPoint slide showing the lyrics to the song that you’re to sing along with the Christian “praise band” up front does not better a hymnal and an organist) and progressive theology.

Our challenge was made more difficult because, as our Seattle pastor noted when I asked him about Boston area churches, “we Presbyterians aren’t too strong in New England.” There are fewer than ten Presbyterian Church (USA) congregations in the greater Boston area, and after visiting them all we were disappointed. Either they had no music program, or their pastor didn’t challenge us, or we just plain didn’t feel at home.

So it was that we returned to Old South, which is an old, old Congregationalist cum UCC church. How old? The congregation dates back more than 100 years before the Declaration of Independence, to 1669, and their current church building, which is the “new building,” since it was completed in 1875. The pastors are challenging and progressive, as befits a congregation about whom John Greenleaf Whittier once wrote “So, long as Boston shall Boston be,/And her bay-tides rise and fall,/Shall freedom stand in the Old South Church/And plead for the rights of all!”. The new senior minister, Nancy S. Taylor, is already gaining something of a reputation in Boston for her clarion voice on matters of social justice (you can read some of her sermons, such as this recent one on St. Valentine and the conscience of the church, and judge whether it’s a deserved reputation).

Further, the church has a solid music program. I’ve been consistently impressed with the choices of repertoire, and though the choir is a bit small (with me, there are four tenors—maybe five) it’s musical. I’m looking forward to continuing to sing with them.

Another day, another 1 to 3 inches of snow. Never mind that it’s almost April. —As I stood in the shower this morning, I came up with the best snow song ever, but I can’t remember it now. Just as well, as it talked about plowing and the snow is melting too quickly into slush to be plowable.

Q: How do you know it’s almost spring in Massachusetts? A: There’s a lot of sunlight on the latest six inches of snow, and it’s heavy and wet instead of light and fluffy.

Lisa’s parents came up this weekend for the flower show, and got to enjoy another heavy snowfall while they were here. But the snow stopped overnight, and when I took the dogs outside this morning, it looked like the whole street had burst into bloom with a profusion of white flowers. Comparing the trees behind the house this morning to the same trees this fall, I’m not sure I don’t prefer the winter version; after all, I won’t have to rake those snowy “leaves,” even if getting the snow off the driveway strains a few muscles.

The Boston Globe says that Chris Lydon is returning to Boston airwaves with a new show, “Open Source,” designed to bridge talk radio and the blogosphere. (See Chris’s press release here). Sounds pretty good—and I smell a new podcast coming…

Interestingly, an article in the Globe today says some students at WUML, who will be co-producing the show, are a little upset that the school’s administration has put Lydon on their schedule—the students feel they’re losing control of their schedule. The administration says that Lydon will be helping to create a broadcast major. It sounds like a win-win for the school and Lydon, but I can definitely see how the students would feel marginalized in that discussion—especially since this isn’t the first time the school has taken air time for “adult-supervised” programming from the student DJs.

We got about five additional inches of mixed snow and ice yesterday and last night. This was just after a day or two of warmer weather that allowed me to briefly glimpse my lawn again. Now I have to get the snowblower out one more time…

At least it’s just water coming from the sky, not ash. Even with all this snow, I’d much rather have sunny days like the one that we have today than the months of uninterrupted damp gloom that we had in Kirkland. Although by now we would have started to see our spring flowers… sigh.

Boston Globe: Big Dig’s changes ease I-93 commute. Wow. It seems like we’ve been reading for months about cost overruns, leaks, falling fireproofing material, and plagues of giant boils in the Big Dig. How nice to read that at least the final configuration of the southbound lanes improves traffic flow. Thank goodness something went right…