Monthly Archives: January 2011

If I were mayor

Mayor Menino got off to a running start this year despite a bad knee. He promised in his State of the City speech to provide better education and access to health care and more jobs. Last week, he gathered Boston’s state legislators together to push for legislation that would allow Boston to reduce municipal employees’ health care costs, allow the construction of more hotels around the convention center and increase certain taxes.

Some citizens of Boston, however, imagine themselves in Mayor Menino’s position. If they were mayor, they’d address some personal piques and more universal themes. Continue reading →

Thankful for Massachusetts

I was in Utah when the Tucson killings happened. I had been reading a front-page article in the Salt Lake City Tribune about the Utah Minutemen and their fellow travelers. The article described the Minutemen’s attempts to “defend” Utah from illegal immigrants, which, the article estimated, was only about four percent of Utah’s population. So the Minutemen turn out to be hysterics. Given what was happening in Tucson, they would have been more effective at defense if they had focused on eliminating guns, not illegal immigrants.

I conflate Utah and Arizona, which lies on Utah’s southern border. They are both part of the land-locked west. The scenery is gorgeous, whether in the desert or the mountains. But I’ve had bad experiences there that told me it was easy for a crazy guy with a gun to incorporate the miasma of anti-government vitriol into his deranged mind and act on it.

On one Arizona visit, I walked out of a dinner party in which our hosts, a dentist and his wife, began to reveal bigotry that was out of a Herman Wouk novel from the late 1930s. I had never encountered people like that. Continue reading →

Contradictions

Back Bay is not a bay. And what is it back from? Beacon Hill has no beacon. Charlestown is no longer a town, but a neighborhood in a big city. South Cove has no cove.

Despite the street sign, there is no Scollay Square. Only five people were killed in the Boston Massacre. City officials in “America’s Walking City” don’t allow the thousands of pedestrians walk automatically. Instead at intersections they helpfully provide buttons one must push to insert a walk segment into the traffic light cycle.

The ‘New’ Courthouse is actually the old one. South Boston is not the south part of Boston. East Boston is North. The North End is still the north end of the Shawmut Peninsula but now is really more in the middle of the downtown neighborhoods. Cape Cod is an island. According to maps, the Upper Cape is really the lower part and the Lower Cape is the upper extension. Maine may be north, but one goes down east to get to its northerly extensions. The Harvard Bridge goes to MIT while the Lars Andersen Bridge goes to Harvard. (Who is Lars Andersen anyway?) Continue reading →

Questions you’ve always wanted answered

Sometimes when you’re walking around the city, questions come to mind. These are questions Google can’t answer. So I thought I’d give them a shot.

In New York City, you know when an approaching taxicab is available because its center light with the medallion number is lit. When the side lights are lit, it is off duty. When no lights are lit, the cab is already occupied.

Boston cabs have lights. Why don’t they let us know when they are available?

There’s a reason, said Mark Cohen, director of the licensing division of the Boston Police Department, which includes the hackney carriage unit. In New York, taxicabs cannot be called by a dispatcher to pick up a fare at a certain address because they have no radios. The cab is either cruising for passengers or not. Continue reading →