Category: Boston

Boston Globe: With one voice, they sing for a cause: A cappella groups seek aid for school music programs. Six local groups are using their a cappella vocal powers for good, raising money to support Boston-area school music programs.

The story also provides a really good example of the side effects of unfunded mandates like No Child Left Behind. With no curricular time or money remaining for music lessons, kids never get to experience high school band or orchestra programs. Even choruses, which require little more than sheet music and a rehearsal piano, get left in the dust.

I learned to sing in a church choir, rather than a high school chorus. In fact, it wasn’t until almost my senior year that I admitted to anyone at school that I sang. But it would be a shame to see music totally disappear from the curriculum, especially when, properly taught, it can reinforce math and physics instruction.

Sometimes ego surfing turns up some scary results. My Feedster RSS feed for jarrett turned up one of those last weekend: a Boston Globe article entitled Back Bay Chorale tabs Jarrett music director. So in the city that was my home for two years, there is a Jarrett who is directing a well known amateur chorale.

But it gets better. He was born in Virginia.

Boston Globe: Kerry pushes for Pops concert: Would punctuate convention week. Heh. “Punctuate” indeed. As in, “@#$!@##!!(!@#$!!!!!”

I love the Globe because it doesn’t even pretend to be impartial when it thinks an idea is stupid. Quoth the article, “The Wednesday evening concert would feature the Pops, James Taylor, and a fireworks bonanza. And potentially hundreds of thousands more people on top of those already in town for the convention… the gift hasn’t exactly been welcomed by some city officials and Back Bay residents, who said the impact of crowds of concertgoers on an already burdened city that week could be more of a curse than blessing.”

Boston Globe: Unearthed skeleton linked to 1812 war. One of the things that I miss about Boston here in Seattle is the sense that Boston and the rest of the northeast have about 384 years of American history lurking, literally, just under the surface. The following note in the article brought that home: “Two hundred soldiers died in a pneumonia epidemic in the winter of 1812-13, [Dr. John Crock, director of the University of Vermont Consulting Archaeology program] said, and were buried in the cemetery north of the hospital in use then — near where North Street and North Avenue now meet. That cemetery, with the graves marked by wooden crosses, gradually disappeared from the town’s memory….”

(Of course, that’s nothing compared to the 397 years of history in Virginia, just a few miles from where I was born. But I digress.)

My point was, this is why I love Boston. It feels more lovable because it feels more human. Humans—we all—have memories buried just below the surface. They make us who or what we are. There are things buried deeply in my psyche that make me who I am. The same is true of Boston. Seattle, on the other hand, sometimes feels somehow shallower. Because America’s roots are younger there?

(Apologies to all my Seattle friends who I just offended in this post, as well as those (like myself) who would point out that Native American civilizations in this area go back quite a bit further than the settling of this city.)

Boston Globe: Path to the Greenway: For property owners, parks mean profits. Unsurprisingly, the Boston real estate market is already pricing in the raise in property values that the creation of the Greenway along the former site of the elevated Central Artery will bring. The same rise can also be seen on the other side of the coast where californialand.com listings show an increase in prices as well and according to the Northpoint Mortgage Company the rise is bound to raise in the next few years.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. When I was in grad school, we briefly flirted with the idea of buying property in the North End. A visit to a 900 square foot brick loft with a view of the Artery (now the Greenway), which was selling for $399,000, dissuaded us. Even then I think the market was pricing in the anticipated increased value of the land once the Artery came down.

So the real questions are: How long will the small business and home owners in the North End be able to afford the rise in property taxes that the increased valuations will bring? And by how much will property values ultimately rise? Any chance of netting back the full $14.6 billion cost of the Big Dig? Somehow I doubt it…

Written Sunday morning at 10 am: Lisa and I had breakfast in Arlington this morning. There is a Carberry’s off Mass Ave in the center of the downtown area; we occasionally visited the one near Central Square (next to the former Ars Digita office—the bakery got free WiFi from the office next door!) before we moved to the North End, back when I was a student.

Then she took me to the airport and dropped me off. Yes, she’s staying an extra few days to take care of some last minute business items that cropped up in the Boston suburbs. So I’ll be handling the dogs solo until Tuesday night (with some help from our doggie day care friend on Tuesday). I’m looking forward to seeing them. We had just gotten them back from the groomer last Tuesday before we left and they were looking quite sleek. I imagine them brown with dust and with their short hair somehow dreadlocked with the long sojourn they’ve had at the Wagon Tails Ranch.

No witty words, just a quick link to the pictures from yesterday’s afternoon stroll.

Charlie, Carie, Lisa and I went for dinner last night at the Legal Sea Foods in Kendall Square in Cambridge. Carie took us in through our original Cambridge neighborhood, passing by Worthington Place along 3rd Street. We saw all the buildings that had been in the process of being piledriven into shape during our residence in the loft there. One, the new Genzyme building, has apparently won a five-star award for environmentally friendly building. (Of course, one wonders whether Genzyme is really doing so well as to need another building in Cambridge right now.)

Ironically, as we were admiring the environmentally friendly building, our teeth were collectively jolted from our heads as we rode over the patchwork that is 3rd Street between Binney and Broadway.

When we got to Legal Sea Foods, we had a 40 minute wait, thanks to the horde of Wellesley graduates that were there. Carie asked why they would come so far, and I had to point out that Wellesley and MIT have a long standing connection. (There’s actually a bus that runs between the two campuses on the weekends. This bus is probably responsible for the T-shirt my old housemate Dina told us about: “MIT Men: The odds are good but the goods are odd.”)

I’m back after a really miserable day. Sometime during the airplane flights on Wednesday, I ate something that kicked in what I can only describe as a really bad acid reflux problem. We arrived at Logan Airport at about 10:30 PM EDT, and by the time we found Charlie and Carie’s house in Medford I started to have pain and a tingle in the back of my throat. To make a long story short, I got no sleep Wednesday night at all. Yesterday was pretty much a wreck from beginning to end. I was still feeling discomfort from the acid (though Pepcid eventually solved the problem) and had zero sleep to boot, leaving me with a headache. But eventually things cleared up enough that I could have a normal (albeit small) dinner, and sleep properly. Now I’m almost caught up on my sleep and thinking a little more clearly. Time to hit one of those 1.8 Dunkin Donuts per square mile and get on with the day.

I’ll be in Boston later this week visiting old friends. Wonder if there will be a Berkman bloggers’ meeting? We’ll be flying out on Wednesday morning.

Incidentally, one of the advantages of working with this particular doggie day care (no more of your mockery, Chris!) is that they’ll board our dogs while we’re away, and they’ll be in familiar surroundings.

Via the Boston Globe’s Odds and Ends RSS Feed: Lederhosen subsidies axed as government tightens belt. Ba-dum-pssch.

Other Boston Globe RSS feeds here (local news especially fun). Thanks to Dave for the pointer.

There are now so many Dunkin’ Donuts stores in Boston that they are causing traffic problems, says the Boston Globe. There are currently 1.9 Dunkin’ Donuts stores per square mile in the city, and the company thinks they need more to alleviate parking lot congestion.

(God, I love the Local News Boston.com RSS feed.)

Hot on the heels of the Cubs’ disheartening fall (as so angrily and lyrically covered by Tony Pierce) comes tonight’s 11th inning loss of the Red Sox to the Team That Shall Not Be Named. Three days ago it could have been a World Series to care about, with one or both of the most cursed teams in baseball in the Big Game. After tonight, it’ll be another Yankees series, with the Marlins thrown in for extra-special “who cares” value.

Man.

When I was in Boston for the Patriots’ improbable run to the Superbowl, the town was alive. It shook off its post-September 11 fear and silence to roar in support of its team. In a way, I’m glad I’m not there tonight, but I’m sad too; I could have wandered into any joint in the city, grabbed a Harpoon, and knocked back a few for the Sox, cursing the Bambino at the same time.

Man.

Oh well. At least the Madpony sisters are there to lend some comedic perspective on the whole thing:

some teams in baseball are cursed. one team is cursed because they traded babe ruth and another team is cursed because they wouldn’t let a goat into their game. furthermore, if these two teams play in the world series some say it could mean the coming of the apocalypse. after my lesson on the game’s supernatural elements, i have officially decided that there is more drama in baseball than in daytime tv.

I talked briefly with Adam Curry on Saturday, just long enough to plug Esta’s blog on Diaries.com—a site that Adam bankrolls. Adam mentioned he got in another new shipment of Xserves to keep the site afloat, and that Diaries is up to about 1000 blogs. I said, “So there are issues of scale?” He said, “Yeah, it doesn’t scale at all.”

Adam also had the best net-to-real-life moment at the conference. He posted on his blog that his laptop was running out of juice, Doc Searls read the post, and passed his PowerBook adapter over.

For those of you reading along, and for whom the name is ringing a bell, Adam was one of the original MTV VJs, who went on to do web design startups in the 90s and is now an expat in the Netherlands. Check out Chris Lydon’s outstanding interview with Adam.

This is it. I’m not sure if I’ll be back tomorrow, but this has been incredible so far. Thanks for the readership. Make sure that if you are in the area, come to the free Day 2 activities. Thanks, Dave, for putting this all together.