Category: Places

In the Forbes list of overpriced places to live, Boston and environs score three of the top ten spots: Essex County, Boston, and Cambridge. To be fair, San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose also got into the list, and they’re pretty much the same place too. Let’s count a single metro area as a single metro area, huh?

I’m in Montreal, QC, today. Took the bike up yesterday, through Franconia Notch, stopping every sixty or hundred miles to stretch and try to keep my ass from falling asleep. Made excellent time: great weather, only a few short showers, and those kind of helped to clean the bugs off my face shield.

I’ve spent most of today nursing a hangover and cleaning up old sites at Top 10 Sources but I did manage to catch the last fifteen minutes of the Mexico/Angola match at a bar on Boul. St. Laurent. (Note to Luis: spoilers follow!)

It looked like Angola was pretty happy to hold Mexico to a draw– Mexico is a pretty strong team, and since it’s Angola’s first time at the cup, and since they lost to Portugal the first go-round, I guess expectations were pretty low. Underpromise and overdeliver, as the software kids say, and you’ll please your customers.

A lot of people complain that soccer is boring because it’s a low-scoring game. But really what it has is a lot of incredible saves, and that can make even a match with a final score of 0-0 a pretty exciting experience. As with any sport, it helps to know what the hell is going on while you watch it.

Also, Angola has a kick-ass flag.

Memorial day parade, Davis Sq. 02144

Damnhandy took some great pictures of his house in Lowell, as he and Vomitola are flooded out of it.

But this is just really annoying. It starts out as a discussion of Jane Jacobs’ ideas of urban planning but rapidly devolves into a stock fear-of-gentrification rant about how childless yuppies and queers are ruining our city. Well, no. The poor quality of schools and the scarcity of decent family housing has driven families away, and the childless yuppies (gay and straight, not sure why they keep harping on the gays being childless, urban, and yuppies, since that’s such an obviously wrong stereotype) are the only ones holding the damn city together. If you want to bring more kinds of people back to the city, then build more housing and make the schools not suck.

I don’t know why I read the Sunday paper. It makes me mad every damn time. Don’t even get me started on the NYT style section. Ugh.

I went to Maine this weekend and hey look at the pictures.

Watching the Sox/Yankees game tonight, it seems that people are furious at Johnny Damon because he now plays for the Yankees.

I’m a Sox fan myself, but this is stupid. He’s a professional ballplayer, not your ex-husband. He doesn’t owe you anything.

I had hoped that Boston WTF would be about transport gaffes, confusing local customs, and so forth. Just like The Daily WTF is all about stupid crap done in the name of software development.

But WTF stands for Web Technology Forum, and it’s all about Boston-area web startups and their cool technologies. Kind of a letdown but also worth reading in its own way.

Today, I learned something about parking. You do not need a resident permit to park a motorcycle in Cambridge or Somerville. You do, however, need to park on the street. Parking on the sidewalk will get you a $30 ticket.

Well, look at El Salvador, where some women are currently serving prison sentences of up to 30 years for having abortions.

There are other countries in the world that, like El Salvador, completely ban abortion, including Malta, Chile and Colombia. El Salvador, however, has not only a total ban on abortion but also an active law-enforcement apparatus — the police, investigators, medical spies, forensic vagina inspectors and a special division of the prosecutor’s office responsible for Crimes Against Minors and Women…

Forensic vagina inspectors?