Category: Places

I left a party in Union Square late last night and walked home. As I was coming up Summer St. a very thin woman wearing pajamas came out of her house, walked down the stairs to her small lawn, picked a piece of clover, ate it, and then went back inside.

First, there was the same-sex marriage ban written into the Virginia state constitution. Then, the Episcopals signing up with the Nigerian Anglicans rather than have gays ordained. And now Congressman Virgil Goode braying about Congressman Ellison of Minnesota and the Muslim hordes (see also this article).

What the hell, guys?

Why do people think this is such a liberal state? The latest Health and Human Services appointee is from here and he’s as much a right-wing nutjob as anyone else Bush has nominated.

Yesterday Rudy caught a homeless guy peeing on the floor in the front hall of our office building. This is the second urination incident this month– last time, our PR reps were leaving and found someone relieving himself against the outside door.

When we called the building manager he said “It gets worse in the winter, too.”

All politics is local, they say. In this case, that means some dick from Quincy is screwing with the Boston city liquor licenses because he got a parking ticket for his boat.

Why can’t Boston set its own liquor rules like the rest of the cities in Massachusetts? Some kind of corruption scandal from back in the 20th century led to a rule that Boston has to get approval from the state legislature. And now that rule is being used to punish the City of Boston for not being corrupt and forcing legislators to pay mooring fees in the harbor.

Boston: where corruption and incompetence come back to bite you in the ass in totally unexpected ways.

One of the advantages of knowing artsy people is that they have a superpower of avant-garde taste. For example, I would not have found this video if I had not met a certain young man from RISD:

Today we are installed in our new office in Central Square.

I can’t find a picture of the old “Central Square is for Lovers” t-shirt that portrayed a man on a park bench, vomiting. But I can tell you that there was one homeless person carted off in an ambulance today. Still, I love this place. Better, cheaper food than Harvard, for one. And fewer tourists. (And, yes, I’ve become a total neighborhood snob. I don’t know when this happened, but I just can’t be bothered to get out of Somerville and Cambridge. Hell, it’s rare that I’ll leave my little triangle of Davis, Central, and Inman squares.)

To-do list for this week includes editing a manuscript, getting more exercise, and getting over myself.

A huge chunk of the Arctic ice is pretty much gone.

I guess the debacle in Iraq won’t matter so much once we’re all dead.

This is getting a little morbid and a little tasteless, but I am gloating that I was so accurate in my predictions about this weekend’s Boston homicide count.