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For those not lucky enough to live near the Hub, the latest news on the Boston news scene is that those mean New York Times owners want to shutter our beloved Boston Globe, where the unions want to be able to keep their lifetime jobs.

Yes, perhaps both sides are engaging in a touch of hyperbole. But for all it’s faults, it would still feel odd to end up living in a one-newspaper town after all these years.

So – what’s the latest bet for what the boston.com domain is worth these days?

When will the first truck be peeled back like a sardine can on Storrow Drive?

Now I think Adamg was fishing for some entries with that title, but it’s a good one, and it’s a good pool to be in. When I think about it, I really look up to those that drive on Storrow – and to those who look up before they drive on Storrow.

In any case, I”ll come out from under my rock and give my prediction: the first stuck Storrow truck of September will not be a U-haul, but will be a major rental companies, and it will happen before 11:30am on this Thursday, as some foolish new freshman is being driven to school by their father. I know it’s a stretch up to believe it’ll be that early, but hey, someone’s gotta go first.

Hey, anyone have a graph of the number of stuck Storrow trucks for the past few years? Or anyone wonder how much the local truck rental places would pay someone to stand by the likely onramps on Saturday to attempt to wave off clueless rental drivers?

• Useful overall guide on Boston.com
• The formal program and details at the Hatch Shell, the best July4th event evah! (watch out for shahhhks!)
• Specific , including Longfellow Bridge, which is not available to watch the show from.
• Other events near Boston (various museum things, plus many of the individual town displays)
• “Boston Harborfest” is another group organizing events, but their website is so poorly organized I’m not going to subject you to it.
• Our nation’s Vice President will be attending an event in Charlestown at the U.S.S. Constitution, so unless you’re planning a political protest, you’d do best to avoid… um, probably Charlestown, Boston, and East Boston, presuming he’s taking a military flight into Logan and needlessly tying up traffic throughout the city on such a major holiday. Sigh.

Happy weekend!

Yes, today I was on a business trip, staying at a business hotel, and got my morning business delivery of U Today. That’s USA Today, of course; but the SA is obscured by the ubiquitous business sticker placed there by the hotel staff.

A couple of things struck me about the front page and news section of Today’s USA Today. One is the unusual and unexpected pastiche of stories featured on the front page. The other are the several local references that snuck in throughout the news.

On the cover we have the center page piece about the Egyptian food crisis, with riots over loaves of bread. While this is serious news, the reportage was so dramatic that I was surprised I hadn’t heard much about it before. Admittedly, I rarely read the newspaper, but still, if there regular deaths in riots over food, I thought I would have heard about it somewhere before this.

In other news news, we have public sector hiring, political coverage of Obama dumping his pastor, and a variety of sidebar tidbits. We also have the item about how pressure is mounting to drop the word “squaw” from geographic and other names. While I admit that this could well be seen as a derogatory and offensive word in some circles, I wasn’t quite sure that it was front page news; not at least without some specific event to the story, besides it’s generic coverage of the issue. Did you know there’s a U.S. Board on Geographic Names (Federal), with authority over naming rights, and that they have an Antarctic Committee? I suppose I learned a significant new fact from that.

Still, it was … intellectually disappointing that this was the big news. Generic story on place name changes, and then politics which are merely a politician distancing themselves from something controversial someone else said. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just be respectful with names, and could actually evaluate candidates on who they honestly were?

In any case, I was certainly pleased to see the Celtics, at least to make the appearance, as well as several other local references. They did give a different perspective from an insider’s point of view. For example, our great Commonwealth turns out to be not so great in terms of reporting child deaths from abuse: a D- is a sobering addition to a sobering issue.

But Today’s USA Today believes in the sobriety of our firefighters, in it’s Nationline sidebar about firefighters attending a memorial. I support their hard work and am glad they attended the memorial, but I would have expected the story to mention our local controversy, instead of merely closing with “80 people died in MA due to work-related injuries”. What, a federal probe and the other recent busts doesn’t rate 5 words? We do need our firefighters, since 400 North End customers are still without natural gas, as the per-state news tidbits note.

We also need politicians who are comfortable with themselves. In “The Forum” editorials, an bit about how national governments are using PR firms to combat perceived slights or misquotes by others. The writer points out that this is often seen in countries who have historically uncomfortable governments – who are “candidates uncomfortable in their own skin – sovereign versions of Mitt Romney”. There’s a mouthful, both of truth, as well as a lovely comparison between Mr. Romney and sovereigns, which somehow seems amusing. I know, I know, the only true royalty around here go by the K-name, but it’s all in the attitude of who you think you deserve to be, I guess.

At this point, I just think I deserve to be asleep, so I will apologize, dear reader(s), for not skwering the rest of the nation’s daily paper for you. P.S. Please keep the Pike eastbound clear for Thursday evening’s commute, since I’ll be driving home, and it looks like it’ll be rainy again. Don’t forget: you should probably get out a little early and drive safely in the rain, and remember to leave a little extra time to get home when it’s wet and slippery.

• Ready to try some Soylent Greens? (HT2LR)
• Or take a ride on some local trolley history? (HT2UH)
• Read the latest on how OOXML is theoretically a ‘standard’. Or scrut the inscrutable for more details and source references about the O -[OXML|DF] wars.
• And you can clearly see that I often get lost, and spend most of my time installing new WordPress versions on my ISP’s SSH shell:


server:me:~ > history | awk {'print $2'} | sort | uniq -c | sort -k1 -rn | head
167 ls
97 cd
28 rm
22 wget
22 mv
20 cat
17 unzip
16 tar
15 exit
14 cp

Yes, it’s true, the Metro’s pages clutter the floors of trams, buses, subways, and sidewalks the world over. It almost makes me feel at home. Sniff. But not necessarily a brand I’m proud that the US has exported…

Oddly enough, the bins were mostly empty, although I didn’t see nearly as many pages littering tram seats as I usually do on the T.

No, today I want to talk about trucks.

Stupid trucks.

Actually, if we want to anthropomorphize the trucks, they probably have a headache at this point; the stupidity should not necessarily be assigned to the truck itself, rather to the driver.
For those not fortunate enough to live near the Hub of the Universe, you may not be aware of our local roadways. We have a lovely river – the Charles (much cleaner now) that wends it’s way through the dense city, separating the Hub of Boston from our fair city, Cambridge. Alongside the river – one might say encroaching upon it – run two arterial roadways.

On the Cambridge side, we have Memorial Drive. This 4 lane, surface road features picturesque views of the river, of the yards of Harvard, and of the many boathouses alongside. It also features stop and go traffic, since it intersects with local roadways every few blocks with stoplights that inevitably have someone attempting to turn left across oncoming traffic.

On the Boston side, we have Storrow Drive. This 4 lane road is divided with ancient metal barriers, and alternates between limited access surface road, and sunken underpasses. While the posted speed limit is 40mph, average speeds are highway speeds, which makes for quite exciting driving with all the twists, turns, and quick elevation changes. None of which is terribly important to the story, with the exception of the sunken underpasses.

Storrow Drive was designed after WWII as a parkway, meant for pleasure vehicles. The underpasses – below each of the major cross streets – feature very low clearance. This fact is advertised with overhead signage at each entrance to the roadway. Normal-height steel beams cross the roadway, holding giant yellow and black “LOW CLEARANCE – TURN BACK NOW, LEST YE HOLDUP TRAFFIC ALL DAMN MORNING” signs at the approximate height of the underpasses.

A bonus feature remaining on most signs (depending on their age) is a wide swath of short chains hanging down another few inches. This serves to make a really loud banging sign against the top of your over height vehicle as you pass underneath. So, for example, if a truck driver attempted to enter Storrow Drive – let’s say a blind truck driver, since they clearly didn’t see any of the signs. So our blind truck driver is driving down an entrance “ramp” onto Storrow Drive, and they suddenly hear a loud BANGCLATTERCLATTERCLATTER from above their heads. Don’t you think they’d notice?

Apparently not, since this morning featured one eastbound truck with a headache sitting – peacefully, for the next several hours of rush hour I imagine – in one of the few pull off areas on Storrow, just past the Doubletree. It also featured a westbound truck stuck near the Hatch Shell, presumably with it’s own headache. Sigh. When will people ever learn?

Wikipedia has a reasonable description of Evacuation Day, but I’ve really come to like the historic details and deeper research that J.L. Bell provides in the excellent Boston 1775 history and gossip blog.

I’m never really sure how much of the modern celebration of Evacuation Day is because of it’s history, as opposed to it being co-located with St. Patrick’s day, since Boston was the first city to have a St. Patrick’s Day Parade, at least on this side of the pond. It often feels like it’s still a local holiday (all Commonwealth government offices get it off) mostly so that locals can attend the parades.

Wow! There’s actually an entire domain name devoted to the celebrations in 2007, although don’t bother clicking through, since they never really updated the site or provide much information about the Boston aspects, more focusing on the cannon’s journey thereto. But you do have to check out the Irish Stormtroopers.